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From: rentsch@unc.UUCP (Tim Rentsch)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: embedded-command text systems
Message-ID: <719@unc.unc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Dec-85 00:29:44 EST
Article-I.D.: unc.719
Posted: Wed Dec 11 00:29:44 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Dec-85 06:46:15 EST
References: <705@unc.unc.UUCP> <2168@glacier.ARPA>
Reply-To: rentsch@unc.UUCP (Tim Rentsch)
Distribution: net
Organization: CS Dept, U. of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 41
Summary: 

In article <2168@glacier.ARPA> reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) writes:
>You are right that most of what is done with TeX is ugly, but the reason for
>this has nothing to do with TeX. It has to do with the aesthetic sense of
>the person using TeX. Systems like TeX give the author too much control over
>the appearance of the document, and if the author misuses that control the
>resulting document is ugly.
>
>I would like to offer up the new Addison-Wesley PostScript reference manual
>as an example of an attractive book typeset in Scribe. The reason it is
>attractive is that its appearance was specified by a professional graphic
>designer and not by a programmer. 

Brian is quite right to point this out.  I have not looked at the
book he mentions but think his argument is valid regardless.  [To be
fair to the other side I would have to say that I think it is just as
easy to produce good documents as bad with a WYSIWYG system, but that
in my experience it is always harder to produce good documents with a
text processing system.  Scribe seems better than TeX in this regard,
but then I've never been a Scribe database administrator! :-) ] 

Furthermore this points out an item missing from my list comparing
WYSIWYG's and Scribe-like systems.  In particular, text processing
systems generally are better at *cataloging* document structures so
that the predefined structures can be retrieved rather than being
re-written by everyone document hack under the sun.  This is
somewhat analogous to a subroutine library -- rather than
reprogramming sin or some such <genericDeity>-awful function, we can
just get it out of the library.

So, you WYSIWYG'ers, add that to your task list!  Our interactive
systems should be able to catalogue and use document structures and
templates as well as text processors do.  But for the time being it
is still true that WYSIWYG's are better for some things, text
processors better for others.  

(Should I even bother to say I think that document structure and
cataloging is best done graphically and interactively?  :-)  )

cheers,

Tim