Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!flute.cs.uiuc.edu!grunwald From: grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i Message-ID: Date: 8 Aug 89 01:02:46 GMT References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu Reply-To: grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu Organization: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Lines: 61 In-reply-to: gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu's message of 7 Aug 89 07:27:00 GMT In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: 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. ---- I think that a fundemental problem is the documents people are intending to write. Few scientific papers look good with wrapped text, illuiminations, etc. Few editions of Time/Newsweek/etc look good without them. Perhaps different tools are needed? Lamport has a good point when he says ``latex lets you worry about content, not form'' -- Time and Newsweek and your local paper often worry more about form than content. -- "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!)" -- "PostScript (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should all exchange PostScript documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)" It's easy to words in peoples mouths. --- 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. --- Overall, your point is well taken. There are times when I've had to beat LaTeX over the head to make it do exactly what I want to do. Thats' why I've written TeX previewers - it reduces the cycletime of making niggling little formatting changes. However, one need not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I think two-view (or multi-view) editing of documents is the right approach. At times, I want to view someting as straight text & use Emacs to bash on it. At other times, I'd like to see a structured representation of the document to move it around on the display, or e.g., force footnotes and their references to be on the same page. If one wants to grouse about e.g., the problems of TeX, one should grouse that it's a ``single input stream'' environment. The command definitions should be in another file/area/marked thing, and text should be text. This is difficult to do with, e.g. the handy little macros we all write to avoid typing things, but it would make two-view systems easier to deal with. In this sense, The Publisher by ArborTeX is, in my mind, headed in a good direction. They also have a table editor and equation editor. The table editor I can understand; tables are visual things, and you should be able to lay it out ``just so'' -- equations on the other hand, I find faster to enter inline (which you can still do in The Publisher).