C70:editor-people (07/12/82)
>From npois!npoiv!harpo!eagle!rdb!jes@Berkeley Mon Jul 12 00:32:46 1982
I have never used a commercial word processor, but I have seen an
editor-formatter that tried. It had a command to embolden a piece of
text which then showed the text emboldened on the screen (inverse
video, as I recall). You could edit the emboldened text using the
normal commands, but if you wanted to put it back into regular font,
you had to delete it and re-enter it.
The point is, as formatting gets more complex, there gets to be a lot
of information in the format, and it is sometimes necessary to edit
that information. An editor which accepts formatting commands and acts
on them, rather than simply displaying them as in the nroff or Scribe
paradigm, should provide a means of editing the format information. I
can't imagine a pure WYSIWYG editor-formatter being able to match the
facilities provided by tbl, eqn, and Scribe. The only compromise that
I can think of is to provide a WYSIWYG mode (oh, horrors) and a mode in
which the formatting information is visible and editable.
-- Jon Shopiro