Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!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 = DIY (=hubris) Message-ID: Date: 12 Aug 89 04:21:51 GMT References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1438@hydra.gatech.EDU> <19001@mimsy.UUCP> <9245@chinet.chi.il.us> Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu Reply-To: grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu Organization: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Lines: 27 In-reply-to: les@chinet.chi.il.us's message of 11 Aug 89 23:14:02 GMT Well, I know at leats one very good reason I use TeX rather than, e.g., Word or somesuch. I run a lot of simulations. For the last chapter I just wrote, I converted the output of my simulation into a `vc' (or `sc') format file using a Gnuemacs elisp function [using emacs as a glorified awk]. I then wrote out the visicalc file to a text file. This formats my data, rounding just like I want it. I then use another Emacs function to insert the LaTeX formatting commands to make it into a table. It actually uses a custom LaTeX environment to do this, built using \newenvironment. I changed this \newenvironment approximately 10 times before I liked what I saw [ using texx2 ]. Using this, I converted and formatted 16 tables of data. It took a couple of hours, but much of that was spent deciding how I want things to look. The next 16 will be easier & faster. How easy is it to import data into tables for WYSIWYG editors? Admittedly, this is ``just another feature'' and probably isn't all that difficult to add, but the point is that I did all of this using relatively old software. Unless the WYSIWYG system has a textual intermediate representation, I think that this would be very difficult to do. Of course, a two-view system would be able to deal with it.