Newsgroups: comp.text Path: utzoo!sq!ian From: ian@sq.sq.com (Ian F. Darwin) Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage Message-ID: <1989Aug24.175125.20753@sq.sq.com> Summary: automatic formatting considered useful Reply-To: ian@sq.com (Ian F. Darwin) Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <15992@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> <152@prcrs.UUCP> Date: Thu, 24 Aug 89 17:51:25 GMT Scott Plunkett (plunkett@prcrs.UUCP) writes: > When the following can be done as easily with a WYSIWYG then troff > may be retired: > > cat < ." version %I% > . > .TS > center, box; > c s s > c c c > l r l. > `pwd` > _ > Name Size Owner > _ > `ls -l | awk '{print $9 "\t" $5 "\t" $3}'` > .TE > ! The conditition could profitably be extended to read: "When the following can be encapsulated in a shell file and run on demand to produce the given report without any WYSIWYG fumbling, i.e., the whole operation of running the report, formatting and printing it can be accomplished merely by typing one line to the shell (or one menu click from X11), with *no* on-screen editing, no transformations and 'importing', in short, no manual intervention, then you may begin to think about retiring some of the automatic formatters currently in service." -- Ian Darwin SoftQuad Inc ian@sq.com uunet!sq!ian -- #exclude