Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!itivax!umich!zip!spencer From: spencer@eecs.umich.edu (Spencer W. Thomas) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i Message-ID: Date: 21 Aug 89 15:51:26 GMT References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <77900019@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Aug17.232344.8058@robohack.uucp> Sender: news@zippy.eecs.umich.edu Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept Lines: 24 In-reply-to: woods@robohack.uucp's message of 17 Aug 89 23:23:44 GMT Greg A. Woods spends a lot of time convincing us that troff can do anything (in particular, it can do any page layout task one would desire). In response, I quote from "Page Makeup by Postprocessing Text Formatter Output", Brian W. Kernighan and Christopher J. Van Wyck, Computing Systesms 2,2 (Spring 1989). ... elaborate macro packages have been written for troff ... a package by M.E. Lesk does vertical justification ... [It] is intricate and slow, and does not address the more complicated task of mixing single- and double-column text with figures of different widths, which is characteristic of technical conference proceedings and some scientific journals. The difficulty with macro packages for page makeup ... is that it is simply too hard to write page-makeup programs of the necessary complexity in the clumsy and incomplete macro languages provided by these formatters. -- =Spencer (spencer@eecs.umich.edu)