2 Jun
2024
2 Jun
'24
6:55 p.m.
On 6/2/24 7:39 AM, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised
when WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't,
but we weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's
potential for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus
fostering portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man
pages on terminals and in book form or technical papers as TMs and as
journal articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math.
(Microsoft Word clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
Yup, that's what I was really meaning to ask and what I was hoping to
hear about.
Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix
philosophy, as it kept
documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for
unanticipated purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca
Cardelli and Mark Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished
their dream of Blue, a WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't
know yet whether that blue-sky goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen
as a ponderous latter-day attempt. Does anyone know whether it has
fostered tool use?)
Interesting, I was wishing for something along those lines after using
TeX Studio for a while. A quick preview side by side is nice, but
wouldn't it be great to be able to work on the preview side of the pane
while the markup side changes (as minimally as possible) showing your
changes as you make them and being able to switch back and forth?
Personally, I prefer troff to tex, but just idea of markup and WYSIWYG
is enticing.
Will