As you all know, I’m fascinated by non-technical people who use Emacs. You probably also know that I have profound dislike of Google and especially their Docs suite, which brings together everything we hate about Word with surveillance and censorship.
Over at the Emacs subreddit, myprettygaythrowaway asks for advice. Their girlfriend is a non-technical writer who is using Google Docs but would like to leave that behind and move to Emacs. Unfortunately, myprettygaythrowaway is an Emacs n00b, doesn’t feel competent to advise their girlfriend, and therefore asked reddit for advice.
Some of the answers amount to, “Why would you want to leave Google Docs? It’s the perfect environment for your needs.” Happily, there are saner responses. The best, in my opinion is to use the Emacs Writing Studio, which is made for precisely this type of user and doesn’t require any coding to set things up.
Some commenters suggest using LaTeX to produce nicely finished documents but, of course, that isn’t necessary. With Emacs—or without it, for that matter—you can write in Org mode’s simple markup language and easily export it to LaTeX and from there to PDF. More importantly, for those involved in publishing, you can also export it directly to Docx, which many publishers demand.
Contra the naysayers, Emacs can be the ideal environment for this type of user as numerous professional writers can attest. Even one of the commenters falls into that category and wonders why he spent so much time using lesser solutions.
If you, too, would like to escape from the Borg or its lessor demons, you can take heart from this post. It is possible and it’s not that hard.