Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!xanth!ginosko!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ico!vail!rcd
From: rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i
Summary: troff has evolved, and can do so again
Message-ID: <15992@vail.ICO.ISC.COM>
Date: 8 Aug 89 04:41:08 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp, Boulder, CO
Lines: 63

In article <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu>, gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> Re:  Troff is great; look at all the books written in troff.

That much is fair - there have been a lot of books done with it, but...

> Troff will die because of the t in it's name -- "Typesetter".
> Typesetters are being replaced by laserprinters, which do a lot more.

Hello??  Typesetters are NOT being replaced by laser printers.  Laser
printers are OK for moderate-quality output (and they keep getting better)
but in the world of serious printing a laser printer is how you get "proof"
output that's destined for a phototypesetter.

Let's also consider another side of this:  Just what is it that a laser
printer can do that a typesetter cannot?  Seems to me that laser printers
are mostly mimicking (photo)typesetter capabilities.

> Take a look at the output language of ditroff sometime.  Here are the
> only graphics objects in the language:
> 
>   lines, thick lines (berkeley), circles, arcs, ellipses, and splines.
>   characters, fonts, font sizes.

If you think this somehow condemns troff, consider that previous versions
of troff had only horizontal and vertical lines, and lacked circles, arcs,
ellipses, and splines.  Lo and behold, troff is software and can be modi-
fied.  (It can even be completely rewritten--and was.)

> Ask yourself, 
[various questions about how to deal with shading, halftones, text other
than horizontal, etc.]

The questions were mostly good ones - things you might like to do (if the
output device can handle it).  Some of them will probably show up in future
versions of troff as it becomes clear how to express the concepts at the
lower level.  For the time being, if you can't do it in troff, you include
a bit of PostScript (my choice) or whatever.

OK, I'm conservative here, but I'd rather have the new stuff done with
escapes until we know how to fit it in, than to have troff get buggered up
with all the half-baked cutesy featureitis that afflicts so-called "modern"
word processing and desktop publishing.

> ...Face it, troff is an elephant, which deserves
> respect, a gold watch, and retirement very soon.

Sure, and the same can be said about FORTRAN/C/COBOL, UNIX, etc...but until
something comes along that's good enough to replace them, we make do with
what we have, so that we don't have to give up the useful stuff to get the
frills.

> I believe TeX will survive longer because its equation-formatting and
> word-spacing ability is unparalleled.  But it will eventually succomb
> to the WYSWYG revolution, or its equations will be incorporated into a
> WYSWYG editor.

There are some of us who aren't likely to get on the WYSIWYG bandwagon at
any time in the near future simply because we think it's the wrong
approach.  I no more want to edit WYSIWYG than I want to fix programs by
editing the object files.  Personal bias, but I'm not alone.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com    uucp: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd     (303)449-2870
   ...Simpler is better.