-*-enriched-*-width:86 grayblueEnriched: A WYSIWYG enriched-text editing environment for GNU Emacs INTRODUCTION This package, along with the facemenu package, is the beginning of a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") Emacs mode for editing enriched text: text with different faces, colors, etc. Facemenu allows you to add faces (such as boldface, italics, and underlining) your documents, while enriched allows you to save the documents with those "text properties" included. The format in which they are saved is called text/enriched, and is defined as part of the MIME standard, so that your documents are transportable (even through email) to many other systems. Not all systems will be able to recreate all of the features of your document, but they will get as close as possible. For systems that do not understand it at all, the text of the document should still be legible; the reader can simply ignore the annotations specifying face changes and the like. INSTALLATION and STARTUP The enriched.el file should be installed somewhere that emacs will find it (ie, one of the directories on emacs's load-path variable), and byte-compiled for speed. The documentation below assumes that you have my facemenu.el (which is included in recent versions of emacs). You may also find it useful to have Jim Thompson's ps-print.el, which will allow you to print out buffers including their faces (unfortunately it is not currently able to deal with merged faces; hopefully it will be revised soon.) These two files should also be installed into your lisp directory and byte-compiled. Put the following code into your .emacs file to automatically load enriched when needed: (autoload 'enriched-mode "enriched" nil t) Enriched puts an identifying header into files it writes, which allows it to recognize any emacs-generated text/enriched file and put itself into the proper mode. If you get a file from some other source, however, such as through the mail, you may have to enter enriched-mode manually: M-x enriched-mode You may be asked a couple of questions at this point: Does the buffer need to be translated now? If the buffer contains text/enriched data which needs to be translated into a readable document with fonts and such, then answer "yes". If you are putting a new document into text/enriched format for the first time, then say "no". Reformat for current display width? If emacs knows that the document was created with the same display width that is currently in effect, it will trust the line breaks that are in the file, which saves some time. If it was saved at a different width, or emacs doesn't know what width it was saved at, then it may ask whether it should reformat. Actually it does not ask by default; it just goes ahead and fills. But if you want it to ask, you can set the variable enriched-fill-after-visiting to 'ask. In the future, other modes such as mail and news may recognize messages that are enriched text, and automatically call on enriched to display them for you. WHAT IS ENCODED Aside from the text itself, various properties are saved. More will eventually be added, so that you will be able to save and read just about anything that can be displayed in an emacs frame. Following is the list of properties that are currently understood; each is covered in more detail below. Faces: default, bold, italic, underline, fixed, etc. Colors: redDarkSlateGrayanyDarkSlateGrayorangething yellowyourgreen screenblue light bluecanviolet display... Newlines: Which ones are real ("hard") newlines, and which can be changed to fit lines into the margins. Margins: can be indented on the left or right. Justification (whether lines should be flush with the left margin, the right margin, fully justified, centered, or left alone). Excerpts: "For quoted material." Read-only regions. FACES The easiest way to add a face to a region is to use the facemenu package. This defines a menu obtained by clicking the right mouse button while holding the control key. For example, to make a word boldface, you could select the word by double-clicking on it, then hold C-mouse-3 and select Bold from the Face sub-menu. Selecting a face from the menu when the region is not active will apply that face to whatever you type next. NEWLINES and PARAGRAPHS Text/enriched format distinguishes between hard newlines and soft newlines. Hard newlines are used to separate paragraphs, or items in a list, or anywhere that must be a line break no matter what the margins are. Soft newlines are the ones inserted in order to fit text between the margins. Auto-fill-mode and enriched-mode's fill functions insert soft newlines as necessary, but hard newlines are only inserted by direct request, such as using the return key or the C-o (open-line) function. INDENTATION Indentation of regions of the document can be flexibly controlled. The face menu contains an Indent item, which indents the region by the width of 4 characters and an UnIndent item which removes 4 character-widths of indentation. All of the text paragraphs in this file are singly indented relative to the headings, for example. In addition, you can indent and unindent the right margin though use of the IndentRight and UnindentRight menu items. The indentation commands can be used repeatedly to get further levels of indentation. There are also shortcut commands to set the left and right margins directly. The basic editing commands in enriched-mode have been modified as necessary to maintain proper indentation, but if it gets messed up, you can use C-q to reformat the current paragraph. This may be necessary, for example, after yanking or pasting text into the buffer. Eventually all commands should respect indentation. Not only whole paragraphs can be indented, but in fact any region. This makes it possible to have hanging-indents on paragraphs like this one: it was accomplished by selecting the region starting after the first word of the paragraph and going to the end of the paragraph, and indenting that. Also notice that this paragraph had been indented on the right until the beginning of this sentence, when it resumed normal width. JUSTIFICATION Several styles of justification are possible, the simplest being unfilled. This means that your lines will be left as you write them. This paragraph, for instance, is unfilled. It was written with one sentence on a line. Enriched will not change that, no matter what size display it is shown on. There is no hard/soft newline distinction in unfilled text. The most common (for English) style is FlushLeft. This means lines are aligned at the left margin but left uneven at the right. FlushRight, as you may have guessed, makes each line flush with the right margin, but not necessarily the left. This is usually, but by no means necessarily, used for headings. This paragraph is FlushRight. FlushBoth regions, which are sometimes called "fully justified" (or, confusingly, "right justified") are aligned evenly on both edges, so that the text on the page has a smooth appearance as in a book or newspaper article. Unfortunately this does not look as nice with a fixed-width font as it does in a proportionally-spaced printed document; the extra spaces that are needed on the screen can make it hard to read. The narrower the column, the uglier FlushBoth text will be. If you think flushboth paragraphs look pretty, though, you can set enriched-default-justification to 'both to justify everything that is not otherwise specified. Center You can probably guess what center justification is for. The normal center-paragraph key, M-S, can be used to turn on center justification in enriched-mode. M-j also brings up a justification menu. Note that justification can only be changed for complete paragraphs (ie, a justified region must start and end at hard newlines). The menu items in the "Justification" menu will all operate on the current paragraph, or, if the region is active, on all paragraphs which are inside or overlapping the region. EXCERPTS This is an example of an excerpt. You can use them for quoted parts of other people's email messages and the like. Currently it just displays as italics (unless some other style is in effect), but this can be changed (see Customization below). DEBUGGING The function enriched-show-codes can be helpful in figuring out what is going if things don't seem to be working. The function can highlight (with a blue or gray background) various items of interest. Type C-c C-s, then what should be highlighted: indent: Highlight the indentation at the beginning of each line. margin: Highlight regions that are indented. newline: Highlight hard newlines. none: Turn off all highlighting. CUSTOMIZATION - Set the default faces to things you like. The faces named fixed and excerpt, especially, can be set to your liking. - User-preference variables: enriched-default-right-margin, enriched-default-justification, enriched-verbose, enriched-auto-save-interval, and enriched-fill-after-visiting (mentioned above). See their documentation for details. - You can add annotations for your own text properties by making additions to enriched-annotation-alist. Note that the standard requires you to name your annotation starting "x-" (as in "x-read-only"). Please send me any such additions that you think might be of general interest so that I can include them in the distribution. - My eventual hope is that people will use the basic code in this file to implement more of the various file formats that are in common use, so that emacs will understand them all and be able to edit them with a common interface. If you are interested in taking on the project of implementing a format, let me know. The code attempts to be as general as possible; a lot of different formats can be defined just by setting up the lists of properties to save and how to represent them in the file. TO-DO LIST [Feel free to work on these and send me the results!] - Be more tolerant of malformed files. - Make the indentation work more seamlessly and robustly: + Create an aggressive auto-fill function that will keep the paragraph properly filled all the time, without slowing down editing too much. + Refill after yank. + Make deleting a newline also delete the indentation following it. + Never let point enter indentation?? + Optional never-let-things-get-unfilled (ok for fast terminals). - Do the right thing for insert-file. - Notice and re-fill when window changes widths (optionally). - Nicer formatting for excerpts. - Interface w/ GNUS, VM, RMAIL. - For documentation, make INFO aware of text/enriched format. - Have another set of alists for reading and writing RTF, etc (this will take work not only on the alists, of course, but also on the code for interpreting them). Final Notes: The MIME standard is defined in internet RFC 1521; text/enriched is defined in RFC 1563. Details on obtaining these documents via FTP or email may be obtained by sending an email message to rfc-info@isi.edu with the message body: help: ways_to_get_rfcs This code and documentation is under development. The most current version should always be available from: /anonymous@cs.rochester.edu:pub/boris/enriched.shar It is helpful to make sure you have the newest version before reporting a bug. Please send any and all comments to: blueBoris Goldowsky <blue October 1994