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From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Why learn Tex?
Message-ID: <1990Mar3.012140.4928@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 3 Mar 90 01:21:40 GMT
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Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu
Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Department
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Address: Rochester, NY 14627, (716) 275-1448

Markup vs WYSIWYG seems to be one of those personal choices, like
command line interfaces vs iconic interfaces. I suspect it correlates
with personalities that like abstraction vs personalities that like
demonstration.  Find the system you are comfortable with and use that.

To some extent it also depends on what you want to do. If you design
lots of one page flyers as opposed to writing a lot of boilerplate
layout papers, your choice might be different.

Let me throw in a few definitely biased opinions.

Equation editors are claimed to be easier to use than typing in sub and
superscripts. Maybe the learning curve is faster. Maybe it's easier
for complex arrays. I find wandering through a maze of walking
menus or trying to remember the accelerator key bindings no easier than
just typing the ^s and _s myself.

Abstraction is useful. I changed the appearance of a logo a couple of
times.  Because I consistently used a macro, all I had to do was
redefine the macro.  But this takes foresight.

Seeing what you are going to get is a warm feeling, but I have often
generated output I never saw in its final form until I printed it, no
not even previewed and it came out just fine. As for letters, I just
take an old letter, rip out the guts, change the addresses and
salutations and bingo, another letter.

I dislike being dependent on having a graphics screen to use WYSISYG
editors. I often type in text on a modem line. I keep my lines
justified but a lot of people don't bother and it doesn't matter to
TeX. Just a fetish of mine.

On the other hand I use WYSIWYG picture editors. I would also love to
have a visual layout editor that turns out TeX declarations.

Reports of the impending death of markup due to WYSIWYG are greatly
exaggerated. For portable documents, automatically generated text, e.g.
from databases, markup is hard to beat. There is money to be made
producing tools to get the job done using the best combination of
tools. Like that layout editor, hint, hint. :-)