Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!casseres
From: casseres@Apple.COM (David Casseres)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG
Message-ID: <141@internal.Apple.COM>
Date: 25 Oct 88 17:33:59 GMT
References: <15691@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 24

In article <15691@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) writes:

>...  is Aldus right? Is it
>inherently impossible to have a WYSIWYG program on the Mac
>as the Next reportedly has?

It's easy to answer this one: just try drawing and printing the same thing
with some other application such as MacDraw, MacDraw II, etc.  I think
you'll find that there's nothing inherently impossible about WYSIWYG, with
one important caveat:  since the Mac screen is nominally 72 dots/inch and
the LaserWriter is 300 dots/inch, the positions of objects and parts of
objects are subject to roundoff errors.  But these errors should be small.

Another kind of error can come up when you mix text elements with graphics
and want everything to fit together in an exact way.  Here the problem is
that the text on the screen is from a bitmap font at a certain size, while
the printed text is either from a bitmap font of a different size, or from
an outline (PostScript) font that the screen font was trying to approximate.
All the fonts are supposed to scale exactly but they often don't really.  As
a result the positions of characters in the printed copy can be off from what
you saw on the screen.  I imagine that this problem is much easier on the
NeXT system, since it uses PostScript at both ends of the process.

David Casseres