Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!elroy!cit-vax!ucla-cs!dberry From: dberry@lanai.CS.UCLA.EDU Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: extensible wysiwyg Message-ID: <14085@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> Date: 1 Jul 88 19:47:04 GMT Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU Reply-To: dberry@CS.UCLA.EDU () Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department Lines: 35 This concerns batch vs wysiwyg formatters. One of the so-called advantages of a batch system such as the UNIX troff is that it is easy to build pre- and post-processors which deal with special purpose text needs, e.g., bibliographical citations, equations, tables, pictures, graphs, indexing, tri-directional printing, etc. If the language of the basic formatter is powerful enough, each of these can be done as an independent program which can be used in a pipe with the basic formatter. Each such independent program can deal with its own special input and the writer of it can focus on designing it right with a good user interface and all the parenthoods. Moreover, it is very easy to add new capabilities as new independent programs, to wit as has been done with grap, indx, and tri-roff recently. In wysiwyg systems, it would seem that the formatter would tend to be more monolithic in that all such other processing would have to be done within the single program. Adding a new capability would seem to require opening up the base formatter and adding the capabilities to it. This could very well be rather messy to do. Please correct me if I am wrong about wysiwyg systems. My question is: Is there a wysiwyg formatting system that has been designed specifically to be extensible in this manner. Has there been any work on structuring wysiwyg formatters to be extensible in this manner? Please reply directly to me. I will summarize replies to the net. Prof. Daniel M. Berry, Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa 32000 ISRAEL Tel:+972-4-294325, Bitnet:DBERRY@TECHSEL Csnet & Internet:dberry@sel.technion.ac.il DASnet:[DDB1DM]dberry, MCIMail:277-9346 Prof. Daniel M. Berry, Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa 32000 ISRAEL Tel:+972-4-294325 Bitnet:DBERRY@TECHSEL, Csnet & Internet:dberry@sel.technion.ac.il DASnet:[DDB1DM]dberry, MCIMail:277-9346