peterson@milano.UUCP (01/08/86)
I think I might mention the text editor/formatter approach used in the
Andrew system, developed at the Information Technology Center at
Carnegie-Mellon University. The objective of Andrew is to support
all CMU computing -- distributing high-function workstations to all
faculty, students, and staff. The ITC is funded by IBM. A preliminary
release of Andrew to run on Sun Workstations, including the window
manager and the editor was released in 1985.
The editor for Andrew is an interactive almost WYSIWIG editor. It
displays multiple fonts, indentation, spacing as the text is entered or
formatted. To specify what text should look like, you select a
region with the mouse and a pop-up menu specifies the 'look' or
'style' of the text. The default styles are basically the standard
Scribe environments: Heading, Major Heading, Description, Example, and
so on. The text is formatted as appropriate for the style and appears
on the screen as such.
The styles themselve are stored as a template and can be editted
(using a style editor) so that the definitions of the styles can be
changed. If you want to see what the formatting styles are that have
been used in a document, rather than just the results of the formatting,
you can ask for the styles to be 'exposed', and they will then be
displayed in a Scribe-like syntax: @italic{text} or @indent{text}.
The editor is not a complete WYSIWIG formatter -- the formatting is done
for the @i(screen) not for the printed page. This is because the window
size on the screen will vary and the formatting is always done for the
current window size. So if the window will only allow 3 inch lines, the
lines are broken and wrapped for 3 inches; if you increase the window
size to allow 5 inch lines, everything is re-formatted for the wider
line length. When you want to print the document, it is translated
from its internal Scribe-like format to a troff format and feed into
troff to format it for a laser printer. The exact page layout can be
previewed on the screen before printing, if page layout is important.
Programs also exist to translate from the internal editor format to
Scribe or troff, and from troff and Scribe to the internal editor
format. Both of these conversions are not complete, because they only
wrote the basic stuff to get the system started. However, I think that
the concept is adequately demonstrated. A WYSIWIG editor can be used
to create the document, but yet still be able to produce Scribe or
troff (or TeX or whatever) output files when desired.
For simple notes and memos, I just use the WYSIWIG features directly.
For more complex reports and books, I generate troff output and
work with troff to get everything the way I want.
Jim Peterson
peterson@mcc.arpa
--
James Peterson
peterson@mcc.arpa or ...sally!im4u!milano!peterson