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Emacs. <br>
<br>
My aunt wrote a 500 page genealogy book which she needed typeset.
It had been written in MSWorks 3 on an ancient Macintosh (c. 1990).
Microsoft had abandoned the file format (and then Works for Mac)
nearly 20 years earlier, so no modern systems could read the file.
After some work getting the file to be readable by anything less
Jurassic, I was left with a text file full of mangled formatting,
random whitespace, broken paragraphs, etc. Since much of the book
took the form of nested descriptive lists and block quotes, nothing
could be done until this was fixed. <br>
<br>
I began doing this manually, but based on the progress I was making,
it would have taken me a few full time weeks to accomplish. I was
able to build some Lisp macros in emacs to automate most of the
work, inserting LaTex along the way, and reduced what would have
taken weeks of manual work into a few hours (including learning Lisp
for the purpose).<br>
<br>
I could also have done something similar using some other scripting
language, sed, etc, but for some tasks it is easier to record a
macro and for others to write one. Emacs provides both, and I used
both.<br>
<br>
I am sure vi can do plenty of heavy lifting as well, but I have
never tried. Most other text editors simply don't have any facility
for doing things like that.<br>
<br>
<blockquote
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<div>What's everyone preferred text editor? <br>
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<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
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<td> David M. Raker<br>
<br>
Director, <strong>Naunet Corporation</strong><br>
☎ (678) 287-0693 x131 or (855) NAUNET-1 x131<br>
FAX: (678) 783-7843<br>
<br>
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