2 Jun
2024
2 Jun
'24
3:39 p.m.
Were you surprised when folks settled on word
processors in favor of
markup?
I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming
into
prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.
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.)
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?)
Doug
2 Jun
2 Jun
3:45 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
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.
lyx does this for LaTeX. It's been around for a long time. See lyx.org.
Arnold
3:55 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
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
5:31 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
On 6/2/24 5:39 AM, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> Were you surprised when folks settled on word
processors in favor of markup?
I was disappointed the world tolerates the fugly typography of web pages.
Hundreds of years of readability knowledge thrown out the window.
3 Jun
3 Jun
12:53 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
Hi Al,
I was disappointed the world tolerates the fugly
typography of web
pages. Hundreds of years of readability knowledge thrown out the
window.
PDFs of books have declined too, and with that the book held in the
hand. It's as if no aesthetic judging of each page's appearance has
occurred; whatever the program produces is correct. Probably because
many books are about technologies with little lifespan; either it will
wane or version 2.0 will need a new book. Books on topics with a longer
life are dragged down.
Full justification is still often used. No breaks around the start/stop
parenthetical em dash causes the very long ‘word’ to start the next
line; the line before becomes 40% space. Sentences which start ‘I’ end
a line. Or page. Sans serif used so that ‘I’ is as thin as can be and
the font, to my eyes, generally lacks flow.
When there's the choice, I skim the PDF and if it's good, go with that.
Otherwise, I pluck for the worse-looking EPUB, HTML under the covers,
because I can unpack it with bsdtar(1), tinker with the HTML and CSS to
fix the worst of the appearance, and then return it to foo.epub for
reading.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
4 Jun
4 Jun
7:26 a.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
On Mon, 3 Jun 2024, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Full justification is still often used. No breaks
around the start/stop
parenthetical em dash causes the very long ‘word’ to start the next
line; the line before becomes 40% space. Sentences which start ‘I’ end
a line. Or page. Sans serif used so that ‘I’ is as thin as can be and
the font, to my eyes, generally lacks flow.
What he said...
And let's not even talk about hyphenating the-
rapist.
-- Dave
2 Jun
2 Jun
5:48 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
On 2024-06-02 08:39, Douglas McIlroy wrote (in part):
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.)
I liken suffering through WYSIWYG for math to searching through drawers
of movable type pieces for the desired piece.
Some time ago, I read a nice article titled "What you see is all you
get" but I cannot find the link (and Google fails me miserably). Found
this, though: What has WSYIWYG done for us:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050207015413/http://www.ideography.co.uk/libr…
S.
8:44 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
Hi S.,
Some time ago, I read a nice article titled "What
you see is all you
get" but I cannot find the link (and Google fails me miserably).
Could it have been ‘Text processing vs word processors’ from Peter
Schaffter, the author of the troff mom macros. It starts with
‘When you use a word processor, your screen persistently displays an
updated image of the finished document. Word for word, line for
line, What You See Is What You Get.’
— https://schaffter.ca/mom/mom-02.html
His -mom, have to be careful here, covers a lot of ground.
https://schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01a.html
--
Cheers, Ralph.
6:21 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
On 2 Jun 2024 08:39 -0400, from douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy):
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?)
Does Markdown count?
Especially when combined with LaTeX support for typesetting math, it's
probably quite good enough for most peoples' needs outside of niche
applications; and there are WYSIWYG editors (not just text editors
with a preview, but actual WYSIWYG editors) which use Markdown as the
storage format.
Of course, what Markdown very specifically does _not_ even try to do
is provide any strong presentation guarantees. In that sense, it's
quite a lot like early HTML. (And that, naturally, results in people
doing things like using different heading levels not to represent the
document outline, but rather because the result renders as what they
feel is an "appropriate" text size at that point in the document.)
--
Michael Kjörling 🔗 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
11:22 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
On 2024-06-02 17:21, Michael Kjörling wrote:
On 2 Jun 2024 08:39 -0400, from
douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy):
I haven't really participated in any real publishing endeavors
since the times of waxed sheets and scalpels, so I have precious
little firsthand experience with e.g. markdown, but I've read
quite the severe critique of its shortcomings. A prime example
is https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520 by
Ingo Schwarze, the main developer of mandoc together with Kristaps
Dzonsons.
This makes me believe that any WYSIWYG editor using markdown as
its storage format really uses some quite strict subset of it,
combined with its own incompatible extensions.
MfG,
--
Åke Nordin <ake.nordin(a)netia.se>se>, resident Net/Lunix/telecom geek.
Netia Data AB, Stockholm SWEDEN *46#7O466OI99#
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?)
Does Markdown count?
Especially when combined with LaTeX support for typesetting math, it's
probably quite good enough for most peoples' needs outside of niche
applications; and there are WYSIWYG editors (not just text editors
with a preview, but actual WYSIWYG editors) which use Markdown as the
storage format.
Of course, what Markdown very specifically does _not_ even try to do
is provide any strong presentation guarantees.
4 Jun
4 Jun
4:22 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
The history of markup and WSYWYG (or, as a friend said, WYSIAYG - what you
see is all you get) is fascinating.
The early markup systems (runoff and its derivatives like troff, nroff,
IBM's SCRIPT) focused on manipulation of representation. Normal, bold,
italic, font size, justification and centering, and so on, were the
vocabulary of the old systems. These systems, to me, were assembler
language for contemporary phototypesetters.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s we began to get systems that, as Douglas
noted, could express the logical structure of documents. GML and SCRIBE
were my first exposures to this way of thinking and they made life much
much better for the writer.
The standards work that created SGML went a bit overboard, to my taste.
The only really serious adopters of SGML that I can think of were the US
military, but there may have been others.
Along the way were some fascinating attempts at clever hybrids. Mike
Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford University Press back in the
early 1980s on secondment from IBM. It had a rather elegant ability to
switch between markup mode and rendering mode so you could peek at how
something would look. I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous
task of converting the OED from its old paper-based production framework to
the electronic system that they use today, though I have no idea what the
current details are.
The hybrid model is not dead, by the way. The wikimedia system adopts it
... you may edit either in markup mode or in WSYWYG mode, though I find the
WSYWYG mode to be frustrating. Sadly, the markdown stuff used by wikimedia
is pretty annoying to work with and the rendering is buggy and sometimes
incomprehensible (to me, at least).
Making a strong system that includes inline markup editing AND
WSYWYG editing with clean flipping between them would be fascinating.
Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy and the ease of creating crazy
markup like <h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in edit mode makes for some
difficult
exception handling problems.
Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 8:40 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Were you
surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
markup?
I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming
into
prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.
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.)
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?)
Doug
5:15 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
I've been using this hybrid for decades, it re-renders every time you
write out the file:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Run the command into PS.$USER
# go into a loop watching the file and rerun command whenever the file
# has changed.
use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
$usage = "usage: $0 comand -args -args file [file ...]\n";
foreach $file (@ARGV) {
next unless -f $file;
push(@files, $file);
}
die $usage unless $#files > -1;
$cmd = "@ARGV > PS.$ENV{USER}";
$gv = "gv --spartan --antialias --media=letter PS.$ENV{USER}";
system "$cmd";
$pid = fork;
if ($pid == 0) {
exec $gv;
die $gv;
}
# Read all the files looking for .so's so we catch the implied list.
# I dunno if groff catches nested .so's but we don't.
foreach $file (@files) {
$stat{$file} = (stat($file))[9];
open(F, $file);
while (<F>) {
next unless /^\.so\s+(.*)\s*$/;
$stat{$1} = (stat($1))[9];
}
close(F);
}
while (1) {
select(undef, undef, undef, .2);
$kid = waitpid($pid,&WNOHANG);
exit 0 if (kill(0, $pid) != 1);
$doit = 0;
foreach $f (keys %stat) {
if ($stat{$f} != (stat($f))[9]) {
$stat{$f} = (stat($f))[9];
$doit = 1;
}
}
if ($doit) {
system $cmd;
kill(1, $pid);
}
}
5:48 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
Hi Mark,
Mike Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford
University Press
back in the early 1980s on secondment from IBM. It had a rather
elegant ability to switch between markup mode and rendering mode so
you could peek at how something would look.
I think that's his LEXX editor which did live parsing and could be
initialised with parsing tables.
LEXX — A programmable structured editor
DOI:10.1147/rd.311.0073
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224103825_LEXX-A_programmable_stru…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEXX_(text_editor)
I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous task
of converting
the OED from its old paper-based production framework to the
electronic system that they use today
Collins, a rival in dictionaries, used troff for a long time to produce
theirs. Don't know what they do now.
The University of Nottingham chose device-independent troff for their
examination papers over TeX because the PDP-11 was affordable compared
to the VAX. The troff source licence cost £4,000 around ’82.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28692919_In-house_Preparation_of_E…
Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy
For markdown, the CommonMark folk have been improving this for a while.
‘We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for
Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate
Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe
this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.
‘That’s what we call CommonMark.’
— https://commonmark.org
the ease of creating crazy markup like
<h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in
edit mode makes for some difficult exception handling problems.
Just treat it as an error rather than attempt recovery? Although the
rendered version could be flipped to, or viewed in parallel, it would be
read only and only get so far; the bug would need fixing in the mark-up
view.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
5:53 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
At the risk of venturing too far off into the weeds (though maybe it's too
late for that)
What do people think of the newer markup languages like Markdown or ASCII
Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a bit easier
to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or TeX.
To me they seem to be clever in that they infer the type of thing from the
extra context marking that you give it, and the marking is more intuitive
than the old-school markups (though still with some twists and sharp edges).
Warner
On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 7:22 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The history of markup and WSYWYG (or, as a friend
said, WYSIAYG - what you
see is all you get) is fascinating.
The early markup systems (runoff and its derivatives like troff, nroff,
IBM's SCRIPT) focused on manipulation of representation. Normal, bold,
italic, font size, justification and centering, and so on, were the
vocabulary of the old systems. These systems, to me, were assembler
language for contemporary phototypesetters.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s we began to get systems that, as Douglas
noted, could express the logical structure of documents. GML and SCRIBE
were my first exposures to this way of thinking and they made life much
much better for the writer.
The standards work that created SGML went a bit overboard, to my taste.
The only really serious adopters of SGML that I can think of were the US
military, but there may have been others.
Along the way were some fascinating attempts at clever hybrids. Mike
Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford University Press back in the
early 1980s on secondment from IBM. It had a rather elegant ability to
switch between markup mode and rendering mode so you could peek at how
something would look. I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous
task of converting the OED from its old paper-based production framework to
the electronic system that they use today, though I have no idea what the
current details are.
The hybrid model is not dead, by the way. The wikimedia system adopts it
... you may edit either in markup mode or in WSYWYG mode, though I find the
WSYWYG mode to be frustrating. Sadly, the markdown stuff used by wikimedia
is pretty annoying to work with and the rendering is buggy and sometimes
incomprehensible (to me, at least).
Making a strong system that includes inline markup editing AND
WSYWYG editing with clean flipping between them would be fascinating.
Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy and the ease of creating crazy
markup like <h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in edit mode makes for some
difficult
exception handling problems.
Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 8:40 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Were you
surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
markup?
I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming
into
prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.
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.)
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?)
Doug
6:29 p.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
On 6/4/24 9:53 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
What do people think of the newer markup languages
like Markdown or
ASCII Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a
bit easier to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or
TeX.
I find Markdown et al. leaving me wanting.
I personally prefer basic HTML for structure and function. If I care
enough I'll add some CSS on top for appearance candy.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
5 Jun
5 Jun
3:13 a.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> writes:
What do people think of the newer markup languages
like Markdown
or ASCII
Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a
bit easier
to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or
TeX.
Speaking as someone who had to fight Markdown several years ago,
when trying to write a converter from Markdown, and who found that
programming language library authors generally seemed to assume
you'd only ever want to convert to HTML ("No, we won't expose the
parse tree"), this old critique by Ingo Schwarze strongly
resonates with me:
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520
Alexis.
7 Jun
7 Jun
10:32 a.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
At the risk of venturing too far off into the weeds
(though maybe it's too
late for that)
What do people think of the newer markup languages like Markdown or ASCII
Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a bit easier
to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or TeX.
Having written books in troff, DocBook (SGML and XML), Texinfo and
AsciiDoc, I can say that the latter two are much more pleasant
that the former two.
AsciiDoc is quite nice once you get to used to it, but sometimes getting
it to layout things exactly the way you want can be difficult. Also,
there aren't good free software toolchains for it to produce really
nice output. The production process for the AsciiDoc book went
AsciiDoc --> HTML --> Proprietary Formatter (Antenna House) --> PDF.
I have not written much MarkDown, but I agree that it's too sparse
for serious (book length) work.
My two cents,
Arnold
5 Jun
5 Jun
12:46 a.m.
New subject: Proliferation of book print styles
On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 6:22 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The standards work that created SGML went a bit
overboard, to my taste.
The only really serious adopters of SGML that I can think of were the US
military, but there may have been others.
Bookmaster (an IBM product, and I think what they used for their published
docs in the 90s into the 2000s?) was SGML based, if I remember correctly.
Writing in it was kind of lovely, and the traintrack diagrams for command
syntax were exceptionally well-done.
It made nice-looking docs (e.g.
https://distribution.sinenomine.net/opensolaris/install2.pdf).
Adam
30
days inactive
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days old
17 comments
15 participants
participants (15)
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Dave Horsfall -
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Grant Taylor -
Larry McVoy -
Marc Donner -
Michael Kjörling -
Ralph Corderoy -
Stuff Received -
Warner Losh -
Will Senn -
Åke Nordin