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From: korn@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Peter "Arrgh" Korn)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG
Message-ID: <11297@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Wed, 25-Dec-85 05:49:37 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.11297
Posted: Wed Dec 25 05:49:37 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Dec-85 03:59:55 EST
References: <2252@glacier.ARPA> <927@mcvax.UUCP> <30@cad.UUCP> <11272@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1941@psuvax1.UUCP>
Reply-To: korn@ucbvax.UUCP (Peter "Arrgh" Korn)
Distribution: net
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 45

Ok, I'll try to summarize/explain all what I know about WYSIWYG editors.
My personal experience is limited to MacWrite and MS-Word (both for the
Macintosh).

MacWrite is a true WYSIWYG.  If you have a page break after the first sentence
of a page, you have some 65 (or whatever) lines of space that you have to
scroll through.  You cannot edit headers and footers except in their own
special windows (otherwise you could edit a header for a specific page, 
which violates the concept of a header).  Repagination is darned slow,
but that's in large part a fn of their coding (in Lisa Pascal, I believe).
You can have (and see on the screen) underlining, boldface, italics, outline,
and shadowing of characters in up to I believe 20 (21 if you push it) fonts,
in some 8 or 9 point sizes (9, 10, 12, 14, 18, 20, 24, 36).  If however the
font size you want of a specific font isn't on the disk, the mac has to scale
what is does have, which looks horrible and takes forever.

MS-Word isn't quite a "true WYSIWYG" editor, as defined earlier in this
group.  For instance, if you have a page break after the first line, you'll
see a line of periods across the screen to inticate that this is a page
break (a line which is one character, in terms of backspacing, etc.).
Further, you don't see the header and footer on every page _as you scroll_,
but only when you print.  And lastly, Word doesn't know what page you are
on until you tell it to re-paginate.  But because of all these things, as
well (doubtless) as a better coding job, scrolling etc. is faster.
Word also allows footnoting and has an expansion glossary feature.  Also,
you have no limit to the number of fonts, and basically any size font is
permissable (you just enter in the font size, and the mac computes it).
As with MacWrite, italics, different font sizes and fonts, etc. are shown
on the screen.  Word also allows you to deal with blocks of texts as
paragraphs (it knows what a paragraph is, and will keep a para together over
a page boundry if you want it to, etc.).  Another nice feature is the
ability to edit several documents at once, each in a seperate window 
(like sun windows), or to break up a window into two portions for the
same file (where the top part is say scrolled to the introduction, and
the bottom division is scrolled to the bibliography).

My personal prefrence for almost all of my editing/word-processing is
MS-Word.  vi's prefered for coding, but other than that (letters, essays,
term papers, etc.), I go for Word.  See also my earlier posting about
creativity and WYSIWYG editors (feedback == more creativity, basically).

Gosh, what else do you want to know about WYSIWYG editors?

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Peter Korn	korn@Berkeley.LotsONets		!ucbvax!korn