I had some experience with using wikis on the web and really loved the way in
with one could write a text without having to think of the final layout.

I loved the idea so mutch that I started searching a wiki-enabled word processor
to use in my PC (and to propose to the company in wich I work as a way to
standardize a little the layout of documents).

Of course I stumbled upon Tex/LaTeX: it's great but very unfriendly and my
M$Word-addicted colleagues would NEVER accept it.

Please don't hit me you TeX-lovers if I say TeX is unfriendly, but I hate having
to write \bf{text in bold} and would instead the easy-to-remember wiki-like
alternative *text in bold* (plus I hate having to compile stuff to see the doc
I'm writing).

Could it be possible to add a text-only ui to Writer?

Benefits deriving from providing such functionality (again, IMO):

* Separation of content and layout

This is something we've been talking about for years in the WWW, but strangely
the concept does not seem to have hit the desktop-publishing very mutch yet.

* Oo proselytism

The scientific/academic community would for sure like (and use) such a feature
very mutch - especially if Oo could provide support for standard TeX syntax as
well as the user-friendly wiki one (also see issue 3403 [1]).
It could be that a few companies could adopt Oo solely for the ease a text-only
imput mechanism would provide in enforcing company layout (after all, they're
starting using wikis too).

* Market differentiation

No competitor software has a similar feature AFAIK.


[1] http://sw.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3403


Before the idea of submitting this issue to you at Ooo struk my mind, I was
designing a configurable text-to-xml engine to be developed in Java (I'm a
programmer working on the j2ee stuff, you know): if it can be of any use, I can
write a description of the software (it could take a few weeks 'cause I'm kinda
busy lately) also, I could actually develop it - especially if it can be done in
Java (My C++ has become a bit rusty).