uri@mit-amt.MIT.EDU (Stuart Freedman) (12/27/85)
I have watched the conversation in this newsgroup with some interest since I started reading it a month or two ago and feel that I should put my word in... First, to the person who asked about modeling things after existing editors, it looks as though Interleaf has modelled theirs after a micro-EMACS. I was amazed that ^X^S will actually save your Interleaf file (no stupid mouse games!). In any case, we have three Interleaf (Sun) workstations in our dept. at work on which we usually run the latest possible rev of the software. I haven't really learned the wysiwyg software (I am the dept. Unix expert, so I get to do some admin chores on them), but I will be doing so in the near future. My observation is that they do give the writer quite a bit of creative lattitude, but it can be done in such a way that they get the chore of writing done first. To give you an idea of the way some of us do things, I did my current book (yes, we are a documentation dept.) almost totally in EMACS on a 'normal' system, but I precoded (just like any 'compiler-like' formatting system) my text for Interleaf and transferred it there for cosmetic fixup. In my opinion, this is a good balance between 'word' and 'art', getting the words done first. One more thing: One of the managers in our dept. wrote a program that translates RUNOFF code into Interleaf code, so it looks as though it would be very easy to do other types of translations between all the different systems (at least among the wysiwyg's that can use ascii text as Interleaf does). Oh, well. Enough rambling. Happy New Year! Stuart Freedman Probably somewhere within 700 miles of Boston Work: decvax!mcnc!rti-sel!dg_rtp!freedman (finally a reliable work address!) Home: reachable c/o uri@mit-media-lab.arpa (put my name in the Subject line) Cleveland: decvax!cwruecmp!ncoast!stuart -- Uri Feldman uri@media-lab.mit.edu MIT Media Laboratory E15-321 (617)253-0326 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139