Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies
From: gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i
Message-ID: <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 89 07:27:00 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28>
Lines: 29
Nf-ID: #R:<1989Jul28:210927:m.cs.uiuc.edu:8800031:000:1447
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Aug  7 02:27:00 1989


/* Written 12:29 am  Aug  6, 1989 by cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu in m.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.text */
> I'm an historian. I've never seen an historical text that would have
> been better by virtue of having the text wrapped around pictures.

Then you've never seen an illuminated manuscript.  Remind me NEVER to
take a course from you!  Of course, this type of wrapping is trivial.
The other type of wrapping (they kind that appears in our local
newspaper "Features" section almost every day of the year) is more
sophisticated.

People should think before they jump.  What I hear is,

"If it's not done by troff, it must be unimportant"
"Troff (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should
all exchange troff documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)"

I've also heard some intelligent points about footnotes, and
multi-column flaws in some WYSWYG word processors (in MS-Word 4.0, 2
columns takes just 3 keypresses, and numerous footnotes seem to work
just fine).

I said troff math output looks better than MS-Word.  I haven't looked
at the output from any Mac equation editors, but they may well rival TeX
(which is superior to troff).  Having written math in BOTH troff and
MS-Word, I find troff math is extremely hard to write, and very tricky
to debug (like it took me over an hour to get a full-page equation
with several cases to work).  On a PC, you could *draw* the equation
in about 5 minutes, despite its complicated nature.