bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) (12/26/85)
I tend to agree with Brian Reid's comments that the importance is in *what* you say. Something that really needs to be said is that most of the fluff I hear about text formatters sounds like really bored people with little to do but 'polish doorknobs'. When I get some 'professional' here calling me up to tell me that 6 point Scuzzy bold italic was not quite right but 8 point was a little large and could I immediately drop everything I am doing to hunt down a 7-point PondScum expanded slant for him/her I usually respond with the old raspberry (makes me real popular, you'd be surprised.) To quote someone here who probably would rather not be quoted: "The only unfortunate thing about TeX is the thought that a mind like Knuth's spent years perfecting ligatures and kerning rather than doing something worthwhile..." or something like that. This whole thing is much over-emphasized. Don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against people writing word-processing programs, on the contrary I am grateful that they do! Knuth is just an exceptional exception (the world would have been better off in my opinion with Vols 4-7 rather than \obeylines.) Obviously he can (and will) do what he likes, good for him. (The most fascinating thing about TeX is that it is a complete software nightmare, one of the most horrifying pieces of junk coding I have ever seen in my life, I am truly amazed at it, invent a new language [web], code a 15,000 line monolithic program in it, no facility for even simple previewing on typewriter style output to check for gross errors before killing trees etc etc, awesomely bad design.) Oh well, doesn't stop the rubes from worshipping it. I digress into these issues because I feel I need to state how important I consider various features of a text formatting system. In sum, I am more concerned with getting the right words out on time than whether a serif is a little choppy. Now, back to the original issue. I have not used every WYSIWYG formatter in existence, not even very many of them. I have used TEDIT, MacWrite, looked at Alis and a few others. From what I am hearing InterLeaf may solve a number of common objections raised about such beasts. Fine, I looked at the price and stopped right there as I am supposed to spend my time in the interest of some reasonable and identifiable cross-section of the University. Not a condemnation of a probably fine piece of software, just a reality which causes me to limit my statements to software I am likely to use. I promise I will look at it again, I am now more curious. By the time you finish reading this you will see why I am not interested in spending megabucks on a WYSIWYG system. Ok, in the good old days we scribbled things on sheets of yellow legal paper and people who were paid to type them neatly onto good rag would go about that with periodic interruptions for enlightenment as to what our scribblings might mean. While the selectrics clicked busily in the background we went back to analysis, synthesis and creation as we were paid to do (we being those who chose fields that did not involve clicking away at selectrics all day.) [To fend off the defensive louts on the net: If you think I am hinting at some sort of elitism here look again, I simply believe we divide labor to accomplish large goals.] Now there seems to be this grand fad to join the typing pool. I guess what I am trying to say is, I am confused. When speaking of a particular form of formatting we should really ask: for whom? for what? for everyone? for everything? I doubt it. Personally I like to bang out simple documents myself with a simple system (troff is fine by me, one font; no waiting but I believe a WYSIWYG might be better.) When it comes to something like a research proposal (if you haven't worked on one then don't guess, ask someone who has) I suppose the best thing would be some sort of markup system where I can generate text and leave footprints around it as to where it fits into the larger document so someone else can struggle with getting the columns straight. This points strongly towards the batch oriented system. Most documents that count within an organization of any size are a team effort of several people acting in various capacities both vertically and horizontally. Somehow I get the impression that the batch oriented style lends itself to this reality (choose a macro package, maybe define a few more specials early on, everyone does their part and later we pull it all together basically by concatenation on the command line, any problems with the look of the document at that point can be dealt with globally by the person with the dusty selectric.) A little previewing is critical (a la troff and scribe as I understand it, note the lack of this in TeX) to make sure that the person who gets stuck with the last stages can reasonably understand what you were trying to do even if you aren't a whiz with table formatting macros (that is, gross errors are removed early.) My impression of WYSIWYG formatters is that they assume that the document is a lone effort; one person is responsible for the text content and look. (why do I say this? why else would it be so critical to have it right as you go rather than just leaving a '.PP' and let someone else ponder how big an indent that should be as a last step?) The critical thing here is that it might be *useful* to postpone minor decisions about appearance until things are ready to be run off. With a batch oriented system I leave my intent (.PP) rather than my solution. Again, a final disclaimer, I would love to have a simple WYSIWYG available to me and everyone around me (actually, we are getting there) and I am actively involved in choosing one (or, likely, more than one) the University can recommend (mostly we are involved so we can orchestrate site discounts and make sure we can back it up with technical help here.) I just am doubtful that any such beast will ultimately get us away from batch oriented word processing for large documents involving, especially, group efforts. The unfortunate thing I foresee is that people (users) will not understand that and be hurt to find out they may have to know more than one system (which I would consider a reality): One for straightforward simple documents and another for large, structured efforts. This is why I prefer very simple WYSIWYG formatters that solve the frequent memo-sized document coupled with sophisticated batch-processing languages that are allowed to grow to be fairly complicated without the cries for 'user-friendliness' as few people in the organization will really need to have mastery of them. If one system can solve all these needs fine, enlighten me. Case in point: In computer science here our Administrative Asst refuses to learn troff and our technical typist gave away a MacIntosh she was given (unfortunately, not to the AA) essentially both because of the reasons I state: The AA puts out mostly simple memos and troff was far too much of a hassle for that and the tech typist couldn't structure large complicated documents on the Mac easily, opting instead for troff and the UNIX file system...there really are different needs in even just that one small office and it is typical of what I see around me. One of my suspicions here is that some of us are talking about systems that exist while others are clearly talking about systems that *might* exist. Please be careful to distinguish which you mean when flaming. Enough kindling? -Barry Shein, Boston University P.S. If you are left stunned and confused at my frontal attack at TeX which seemed to approach a non-sequitar in this discussion just ignore it, but I have felt for a while that some of this needs to be said somewhere, at worst I am an opportunist.