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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i
Message-ID: <77900019@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 89 14:57:00 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28>
Lines: 28
Nf-ID: #R:<1989Jul28:210927:p.cs.uiuc.edu:77900019:000:1273
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Aug 15 09:57:00 1989


Re: "Troff is great because it lets me pass a document to my friend
and he can revise it, i.e. we can work on it together".

Answer: Well, maybe he cannot.  Are you aware that troff layout
depends heavily on the type of output printer?  Do you realize that
all your widow control (figure placement) depends on where the page
breaks end up?  Troff supports at least 3 types of printers (Imagen,
Postscript, HP Laserjet), and each kind has different character widths.

In fact, this week I reformatted an Impress document in Postscript,
and the output was lousy.  To share this document (original in
Impress) with someone using a Postscript printer would result in a war
over equation and figure placement.

This is a general problem not confined to troff.  So don't assume that
troff solves this problem -- it does not.  Nobody has solved this
problem.

On the other hand, using a device-independent standard like
postscript, at least you can pass a hardcopy to a friend, and
information will not be redistributed or mangled among the pages (ever
see what happen to a table when it crosses a page?)


Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies