EMACS for word processing?

Question

I've heard some stuff about EMACS being usable for word processing... How usable is it? Can it be made to do WYSIWYG editing of documents with headers, footers, and/or double-spaced text, in a format that MS Office will be able to read?
(If you must know, I have to deal with MLA format in an academic setting, and am not a huge fan of Abiword or OOo when it comes to actually writing stuff...)

Answer 1

[Edit: posted too slow, but some stuff near the end may be of interest...]
You could use emacs to create LaTeX source files. (See texlive for LaTeX packages for Arch.) Emacs has a number of extensions to aid with LaTeX document composition, the best known being AUCTeX. While it does have some preview features, AUCTeX by itself is not exactly WYSIWYG, though these days most LaTeX users generate PDF documents which shows them exactly what the output will be before printing.
The quality of LaTeX typesetting is much better than what you get by default with MS Office or Open Office or AbiWord. Once you have a LaTeX document, converting it to one of those formats feels like a downgrade. But if you needed to generate something that they can handle for the purposes of collaborating with a colleague, you could use tex4ht, which has scripts for converting to ODT or HTML. There are other conversion methods too.
I use vim for LaTeX composition personally, and almost never need to use a Word Processor.
I hate to invoke stereotypes, but most liberal arts profs don't know a lot about computers.
Well, I am a liberal arts (philosophy) prof... so infer from that what you will.
Last edited by frabjous (2010-10-28 19:31:14)