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From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: Typesetting systems / WYSIWYG / ...
Message-ID: <3066@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 7-Dec-85 02:44:50 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.3066
Posted: Sat Dec  7 02:44:50 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Dec-85 03:34:15 EST
References: <903@osu-eddie.UUCP>
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Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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> I don't WANT to manually lay out each page of my document.  I don't even
> want to manually lay out section headings and the like.  I want to specify
> the format I want once, in excrutiating detail if necessary, and not worry
> about it again.  Aside from that, TeX's handling of kerning, page and line
> breaking, etc., works correctly.  In the uncommon situation that you need
> it to act differently, it can.  All you have to do is tell it what you want.
> If you want unhyphenated, ragged-right text set without leading, you can do
> it by putting one line at the beginning of your text.  If you decide it was
> a bad idea after all, take out that line.  Voila!.

And here we have an example of the very sort of confusion you decry.  There
is *N*O*T*H*I*N*G* in the notion of a WYSIWYG system that *requires* you to
"manually lay out each page of the document", or "even... manually out
section headings and the like".  Any reasonable WYSIWYG system will, at
least, allow you to say "please lay out the pages for me".  Interleaf, in
fact, does this layout as a part of its display.  You don't have to do
anything to get your pages laid out; they just *are*.  As you type or delete
stuff, the display changes to reflect the new layout.

Furthermore, if you want unhyphenated, ragged-right text set without
leading", you just set the "component properties" sheet for all the
components of type "paragraph" to say "Hyphenation Off, Alighment Flush Left,
Line Spacing 1 line, Bottom Margin 0 inches" (I presume by "without leading"
you mean no extra leading between lines or between paragraphs; if this is
not what you meant, the changes to the property sheet should be obvious.
(In case anybody's curious, Interleaf uses the Knuth-Liang algorithm.)  If
you "decide it was a bad idea after all", you just change the "component
properties" for all the components of the type in question again.

There are things Interleaf does not do.  The release that I'm looking at the
documentation for doesn't handle footnotes, for instance.  It also doesn't
know how to automatically number things like paragraphs or section headings.
On the other hand, although the WYSIWYG editor that I did at CCI didn't do a
lot of the things Interleaf did, it did handle footnotes and it did
automatically number paragraphs and section headings (and footnotes!).  So
those can be done by WYSIWYG systems, too.

	Guy Harris