Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!mailrus!iuvax!silver!chiaravi
From: chiaravi@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG
Keywords: WYSI*A*WYG
Message-ID: <2482@silver.bacs.indiana.edu>
Date: 20 Oct 88 07:02:28 GMT
References: <6937@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <12908@oberon.USC.EDU>
Reply-To: chiaravi@silver.UUCP (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Organization: Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 46

In article <12908@oberon.USC.EDU> venkat@brand.usc.edu (V. Venkat) writes:
[About the NeXT screen and laser printer resolution]
>With a 17" diameter screen i.e. apprx 12" X 12" screen and a 1024X1024 pixels
>-- the screen resolution will be about 86 pixels per inch.
>Since the printing is essentially WYSIWYG a laser printer with 86 dpi
>will suffice. What is the use of a 400 dpi laser printer unless the screen
>represents only a part of the printed page and you have some scrolling 
>mechanism? Maybe I haven't understood the fundamentals here. Can someone
>illuminate me further on this matter. Much thanks.

	Many word processing and graphics programs -- especially the ones on
the NeXT and the Macintosh -- are called WYSIWYG:  What You See is What You
Get.  However, that is not quite an accurate description of the real key
concept, which is WYSIAWYG:  What You See is Almost What You Get.  With
Macintosh programs -- and I assume the idea is similar (although different
in implementation) with the NeXT programs -- you have your document on the
computer, whose concept of what it looks like hopefully is equivalent to your
concept of what it looks like.  On whatever display device you are using --
screen, laser printer, or ImageWriter (Macintosh only) -- you see your
document mapped to whatever resolution the display device is capable of (on
ImageWriters, this depends on which print quality you have selected).  Thus,
on the NeXT screen you get an 86 dpi representation of your document; on the
NeXT laser printer you get a 300 dpi or 400 dpi representation of your
document; on a Macintosh screen or an ImageWriter in Faster mode you get a 72
dpi representation of your document; on a LaserWriter you get a 300 dpi
representation of your document; and on the latest model of LinoTron you get a
2540 dpi representation of your document (don't quote me on that last number).
Depending on the physical size of your screen and how much magnification/
demagnification is applied to documents displayed on it under your chosen
hardware/software combination, the screen may or may not be able to show all
of a printed page at once, but your document is generally not shown with the
same resolution on the screen as it will have when printed unless you have
selected magnification (-: massive magnification if you are editing a bitmap
to be typeset on a Linotron :-) or unless you are on a Macintosh and printing
your stuff on an ImageWriter in Faster mode.

	Hope this helps.

	-- Lucius Chiaraviglio
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-- 
	-- Lucius Chiaraviglio
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