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From: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Unix Desktop Publishing vs. Mac [was Re: Commodore's handling...]
Message-ID: <223@esquire.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Nov-87 15:51:52 EST
Article-I.D.: esquire.223
Posted: Fri Nov 13 15:51:52 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Nov-87 11:45:17 EST
References: <8711030308.AA01230@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 50
Keywords: troff, psfig

In article <33783@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
>>I, too, believe in using the right tool for the right job, and when it comes
>>to individual page layout and graphic design, the Mac is unsurpassed.  But
>>when it comes to complicated, multi-page technical documents, where
>>relationships between the elements of the document become more important than
>>its physical layout (e.g., you want to break the page here if and only if
>>a certain table won't fit on the remainder of the page, etc.), face it guys,
>>the Mac just can't hack it.  You need troff or TeX.
>
>you haven't seen Ready, Set, Go! 4.0 yet. Take a look at it before you make
>wide, generalized statements like this...

Actually, I _own_ RSG4, and it meets all of my personal page layout needs.
As far as I'm concerned, RSG is the best DTP software available for the Mac.
But it just can't do the kinds of things required for any kind of serious
technical document layout.  As I mentioned in my original posting (quoted
by Chuq above), you _can't_ tell RSG (or any other WYSIWYG software) to "break
the page if this", or "draw a box around that", or "attach this graphic to this
text and scale it correctly with regard to font size".  You can do all of
this (and _much_ more) with text formatters like troff or TeX.

A simple example.  I want to take a graphic and fit it into a column
of text.  While I can import and place a graphic in RSG, I can't tell it
to scale the graphic to the size of the column it's in, because picture
blocks are entities unto themselves... they don't know about the rest of
the document.  So while WYSIWYG software allows you to _put_ things anywhere
and do neat stuff with text runaround, it doesn't always let you do what
you _want_, which it to set up a series of relationships between the
elements of your document and have the program worry about placing things.

Of course, this is precisely why troff, TeX and PostScript are so powerful.
Because they let you do more than just put text in a certain spot on the page,
you can get them to do what you really _want_... like "draw this text using
this to crop it" or "draw this text fit to this line" (a line which can
then be defined as straight, curved, spiral, or whatever -- but defined
seperately from the text that's to be fit to it).  Try doing any kind of
table layout with WYSIWYG software and you'll see what I mean.  Without
something like tbl, you just can't do it (assuming that you still want to
be able to add or delete text from the table).

Sorry this posting is so long, but I think it's important to understand
that there are drawbacks to WYSIWYG, just as there are drawbacks to using
a page description language.  Maybe as DTP software becomes more advanced
we'll begin to see more and more elements of PDLs made available to the
novice user.  Then we'd have the best of both worlds.

-- 
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   ...!seismo!cmcl2!esquire!sbb |                           - David Letterman