So we are looking at a Rich Text Editor rather than a Word Processor? It’s a start, but writing is what I do for a living and I, for one, won’t be able to remove all those “other” operating systems and go Haiku-only until I have a word processor with
- auto-updating footnotes
- auto-updating endnotes
- auto-updating cross-references
- an auto-updating reference manager
- ToC and index generation (those can be manual update)
- different levels of page numbering in the same document (i…xii, 1…200)
- multiple languages within the same document for spell- and grammar-checking.
- Track changes/merge documents
That is asking for a lot, I know. It is like hard-core spreadsheet users asking for pivot tables in Sum-It.My point is, though, that this is asking a lot from HTML, which really is a display technology, not an editing technology. A decision taken at this stage will limit us later. RTF is probably too old now, but if you designed your gadget around a subset of ODT, you would be able to expand it later. And OpenOffice isn’t going anywhere, so your documents would be readable by other people for a long time.
Anyway, having Rich Text Editor and Word Processor gadgets are not mutually exclusive. You could do the one now, and then later use the experience gained to do the other. Good luck!