Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!ncar!gatech!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!a.cs.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!grogers
From: grogers@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: extensible wysiwyg
Message-ID: <8800018@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 2 Jul 88 18:29:00 GMT
References: <14085@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Lines: 28
Nf-ID: #R:shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU:14085:m.cs.uiuc.edu:8800018:000:1363
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!grogers    Jul  2 13:29:00 1988


The Andrew Toolkit for X windows provides just what you want.  The toolkit
provides the mechanisms for object oriented programming style within the C
language.  This is done through a preprocessor to C; similar to C++.  There
is also a runtime library that performs dynamic loading and linking of new
object classes.  With the toolkit comes a set of classes for formated text,
tables, pictures, equations, frame animated drawings, and some other
miscellaneous stuff.  There is an interobject protocol defined that allows
objects to contain other objects.  Thus, a text object may contain a table
which might in turn contain some equations.  Now because of the runtime
loading and linking, anyone can create new classes and that work with the
existing classes and applications.

An editor comes with the toolkit that provides interactive access to any
object class that can be dynamically loaded.  Through the object class
viewers, this editor provides What-You-See-Looks-Real-Neat editing.
Of course you don't really want wysiwyg becuase then you could not "see"
animations within your documents or have hypertext (just how would you
print the hypertext graph?)


The best part: all this is free from CMU and is included as part of the
normal X distribution.

The worst part: this software is fairly new and needs some polishing.

Greg Rogers
grogers@cs.uiuc.edu