Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!amelia!eos!shelby!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!dartvax!griggs!hugo
From: hugo@griggs.dartmouth.edu (Peter Su)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i
Message-ID: <14903@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 8 Aug 89 12:52:34 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: hugo@griggs (Peter Su)
Organization: Dartmouth College
Lines: 104

In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>/* 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.

Amen.

>"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!)"
>

Okay, I will not claim that troff is the be-all and end-all of text
processing systems.  I won't even claim that it is any good.  I will
claim that it is more powerful an flexible than any of the pretty toys
you can run on the Macintosh or other PCs.  I don't even like troff, but
I'd rather use it than MS Word, Macwrite, Word Perfect, or any of that
dreck.

>Comments about math and multiple columns.

Ok, let's get away from kid's stuff.  Most available programs are pretty
good at layout.  But, layout isn't all there is to a good text
processor. In fact, layout is arguably the LEAST important feature of a
good text processor.  A good text processor should let you do useful
things to your text easily.  To that end, no PC based text processor I
have used is any good, because I have never used one that could do any
of the following, relatively easy things:

1) Generate bibliographies from a set of bibliography database queries
(i.e. like refer or BibTeX).  These should be able to be formatted in
many different ways, depending on the document style.

2) Allow the user to label sections, figures, theorems, equations,
whatever, with symbolic names and then use those names to generate cross
references.  Like, "see Figure \name{foo}" generates "see Figure 2 on page
30..."  Oh, these cross references should be allowed to be numberedany
way I like (i.e. by chapter, section, subsection, part, *anything*), and
also formatted any way I like.

3) *Easily* split a document up into "modules" and have the capability
to only format selected parts when I need to.  Of course, this only
applies to batch type formatters, but none of the interactive formatters
allow you to link documents easily.  Like in Word, you can do it, but
you have to keep track of the starting page numbers for each document
manually, this is *stupid*.

4) Allow the user to give symbolic names to frequenty used constructs
(say, some mathematical notation) so that if that construct happens to
change, he/she only has to change the definition of the name in one
place, not all over his/her document.  Really, no text editor alive can
munch through say, 1000 pages of text doing a global replace without
being *real* slow about it.  And what if I'm changing, say 

"g(x) sub x sup y" to "g(x) sup x sub y"... or something similarly
hideous?  

5) Conditionally generate text in applications other than mail merge.

6) Automatically number sections of text in arbitrary ways.  Like, say I
want my Chapters numbered "a,b,c..." then sections "I, II , III..." then
the rest "1,2,3..." can your favorite word processor do this?  What if
later i decide that I don't like that scheme and want to change to all
arabic numerals.  Suppose I want to number things by chapter and
section, but I don't want a dot to separate the section number from the
chapter number, so chapter 1 section 1 is "11"...(I helped to format a
book where this was what the author wanted)?

7) Search and replace on regular expressions...


I can go on and on.  The gist of this is that I do not really care if
the latest wiz bang 'word processor' on the block can wrap text around
an arbitrary b-spline, or include 8 bit gray scaled images with my text.
I don't care if can let me edit text formatted in 8 columns, each in a
different type face with different line spacing.  All those CPU cycles
are being wasted displaying information that is not important until
after I have written my text, and I don't want to think about until
then! Meanwhile, there are no cycles left for useful, text oriented
functions like the ones I mentioned above.

And, to quote Leslie Lamport, without permission:

"As you are writing your docement, you should be concerned with its
logical structure, not its visual appearence."

or

"LaTeX was designed to free you from formatting concerns, allowing you
to concentrate on writing.  If, while writing, you spend a lot of time
worrying about form, you are probably misusing LateX."

I claim that WYSIWIG are overly concerned with form, and no concerned
enough about with the logical operations that result in the form 
that you want.

I will also claim that LaTeX isn't the ultimate answer.  It has its
problems, and some of them are BIG, but I think that right now it is the
least awful of all the evils.

Thank you for listening,
Pete

hugo@sunapee.dartmouth.edu