root@netdev.UUCP (Alex Huppenthal) (01/14/90)
Has anyone developed a TeX front-end that presents What You See Is What
You Get (WYSIWYG) pages, and produces TeX output ?
Ideally, I'd like to use a "MS Word for Windows" document creation/editing
approach, with TeX as the intermediate language. For software
documentation, user manuals design documents, we use RCS, as the revision
control system, and it doen't like Word's mixed text format.
Of course, one can save Word docs in clear text format, but that's not
desirable, because you lose the control information.
Any WYSIWYG editor for TeX bobbing around ? Commercial or public is fine.
I am aware of the dvi previewers, although I haven't used them.
I'd like to make changes to documents by manipulating objects on the screen,
not in text - preview - back to text - preview - back to text.
If there isn't one, would it pay to develop one ?
--
Alex INTERNET: alex@comsys.COM
Huppenthal UUCP: {cs.utexas.edu!texbell}!netdev!alex
Communication Systems Research 6045 Buffridge Tr, Dallas, TX 75252 bsrdp@warwick.ac.uk (Hylton Boothroyd) (01/14/90)
In article <232@netdev.UUCP> alex@netdev.comsys.com (Alex Huppenthal) writes: > Of course, one can save Word docs in clear text format, but that's not > desirable, because you lose the control information. An alternative is to save the documents formatted, and to strip the formatting information before feeding to the screen/printer display programmes. I messed around with that for a while when I first installed Microsoft Word 3.1, and wrote two utilities: * a simple debug-source-code for a filter to take the start and end of the file away - I did that by modifying a disassembly of `more', * a Turbo Pascal source to screen the source file for things like matching {} and to return code that would allow the controlling batch file to abort before gross mistakes were fed to TeX/LaTeX. For long documents with many input files, however, the consequence was that I then had to devise a further file-management layer on top of what was already a fairly complex process. So although I could chug along with it as a private system, it never seemed to me to be something suitable for general circulation. Nor is it now. But you get the general idea.
koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E. Koontz X5180) (01/15/90)
In article <365@clover.warwick.ac.uk>, bsrdp@warwick.ac.uk (Hylton Boothroyd) writes: > > An alternative is to save the documents formatted, and to strip the > formatting information before feeding to the screen/printer display > programmes. I messed around with that for a while when I first installed > Microsoft Word 3.1, ... If you are going to mess around with ad hoc extraction processes it is easier to start with a word processor that records its formatting information in clear ASCII, like XyWrite, Nota Bene, or, I think, Word Perfect.
bsrdp@warwick.ac.uk (Hylton Boothroyd) (01/15/90)
In article <2147@alpha.cam.nist.gov> koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E. Koontz X5180) writes: > In article <365@clover.warwick.ac.uk>, bsrdp@warwick.ac.uk (Hylton Boothroyd) writes: > > > > An alternative is to save the documents formatted, and to strip the > > formatting information before feeding to the screen/printer display > > programmes. I messed around with that for a while when I first installed > > Microsoft Word 3.1, ... > > If you are going to mess around with ad hoc extraction processes it is > easier to start with a word processor that records its formatting > information in clear ASCII, like XyWrite, Nota Bene, or, I think, Word > Perfect. Perhaps I should have also said that in that version of Word, the formatted file has a simple structure: i) 128 byte header, with identifying byte and address of start of part (iii); ii) visible text; iii) all format information. So for input to TeX/LaTeX all that I needed was to trim off (i) and (iii). Hylton
clement@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Clement Pellerin) (01/16/90)
In article <232@netdev.UUCP> alex@netdev.comsys.com (Alex Huppenthal) writes: >Has anyone developed a TeX front-end that presents What You See Is What >You Get (WYSIWYG) pages, and produces TeX output ? There is a wysiwig TeX available on the Mac. I can't remember the name, we don't use mac's around here. Check out VorTeX from BSD (Visually Oriented TeX). The package contains IncTeX, an incremental TeX compiler. Unfortunately, it runs on X10, with X11 in the works (but don't hold your breath). You can work back and forth on the TeX source and on the visual representation. Also included is makeindex, an indexing facility for Latex. Pehong Chen is the chief architect of IncTeX. His PhD's dissertation is ``A Multiple-Representation Paradigm for Document Development''. Report No. UCB/CSD 88/436 180 pages. Contact: Michael A. Harrison Computer Science division 571 Evans Hall University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 Univ FAX: (415) 642-5775 email: harrison@renoir.berkeley.edu We bought the package but we did not install it yet. I don't know how it rates. Besides, we don't have X10. -- news <clement Clement Pellerin, McGill University, Montreal, Canada clement@opus.cs.mcgill.ca