RADA%MVA.CS.LIV.AC.UK@MITVMA.MIT.EDU (ROY RADA) (01/25/90)
Subject: Hypertext and Emacs I appreciate the helpful responses that I received to my query about hypertext and Emacs. I sent it to an address which I found in an Emacs manual and gather the message reached a group of people. First I will update you on my work and then list some response to the individuals that were kind enough to respond to my query. ******** Akmal Zeb at Liverpool has just translated my book on Hypertext minus the graphics into INFO-form. I've noted others describing methods of automatically distributing material in response to queries, but I'm not familiar enough with the mailer software to do that myself. The book in INFO-form is about 10 files of about 50k bytes each. I'm willing to share it for free but am not sure of what distribution mode to use. If you would like a copy, please tell me how you suggest I send it to you. We are starting a project to build over the next couple of months a rapid prototype hypertext system that supports several features of collaborative authoring and I'd be interested in sharing information about that with people too. I could send a rough 1-page requirements which I wrote a few days ago. I continue to be concerned about the attractiveness of GNU Emacs on Unix workstations versus the larger market of MS-DOS machines. Mightn't something like ANDREW be more appropriate for Unix workstations? ******** Russell Nelson responded about Freemacs which I should pursue. Does Freemacs include an INFO-like document browser? How different is the string language of Freemacs from Mlisp? Katz at ISI said that info-gnu-emacs@prep.ai.mit.edu was the main GNU Emacs mailing list. So I'll try sending this message to there and again to the address which I used the first time. Michael Patton commented on his interest in a grass-roots hypertext publishing system. So am I. How do you deal with graphics? Major gave a good description of the Emacs copyright situation and noted that as long as the source code of Emacs was made available and could be freely copied that it could be distributed without violation of copyright. Mark Zimmerman renewed a relationship that we had in Washington, D.C. Nice to meet you again Mark. You noted that a group reachable through para@bbn.com was interested in Emacs and hypertext. I'll send my note there too. I read about something called Folio-Text in Byte some months ago and thought of you. The system was highly rated and didn't do more than your software did. Todd Kaufmann sent me the GNU Emacs General Public License--thank you. Robert Chassell described Texinfo. My book was written with the Unix Document Workbench but I could translate things into Tex. You said that the Texinfo source can be freely edited. Can it be edited and simultaneosly work within Info? You also noted that Emacs and Tex are large? What would be the minimum distributable size of Emacs? Simon Kaplan didn't respond to my message but had sent to others a note about Epoch which sounded like useful software to use to extend GNU in X11. ********* Thank you for your attention, Roy Rada