cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) (07/23/89)
In article <8735@attctc.Dallas.TX.US> wnp@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Wolf Paul) writes: }In article <18681@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes: }>The problem actually goes deeper than this. The whole point of WYSIWYG }>is that what you see is what you get: you see what you get; you get }>what you see. ... } }However, some of the more popular word processors in the PC world, }notably PC-Write, are very much like a combination of editor and }formatter in a UNIX environment. ... } }And even more expensive and sophisticated programs like MS-WORD do }not act as WYSIWYG systems while you are entering and editing text -- }not until you hit the PREVIEW command do you get to see an (often illegible!) }approximation of what your page looks like. So someone could equally }well write a troff or tex screen previewer (maybe this even exists, already) Just so: on the Amiga, AmigaTeX will let you run with two windows open and type TeX into one and have the previewer show it to you formatted in the other (most of this comes partly-for-free because, unlike the MAC and the PC, the Amiga will really multi-task, and so having the two windows 'active' is no real trick: the only sneaky part is the IPC to get your text down into TeX, and then the .dvi back up to Preview mostly auotmatically). }And in any case, give me systems which store my files as flat text files, }with formatting instructions embedded where they belong, rather than systems }like WORD, which have their own proprietary file format which is difficult }to decipher and convert to something else, or to rapidly modify using such }tools as sed and awk. There are two other major problems with WYSIWYG systems: they lose most of the logical structure of the document, and so impede its text being used in other contexts (where the printing rules may be different). The newer WYSIWYG systems (like Word 4.0) address this to some extent, but it is still fairly marginal by the standards of the really powerful highlevel markup systems [for example: you start on a doc that will talk about Unix and decide, for no really good reason [you're not really trained in all this, after all] to use boldface for Unix commands AND Unix file names. You run off a proof of your document and realize that this is was a loser of a decision: how do you change it now? In TeX, you would have had \filename and \command and just tweaked one or the other. When this happened with a WYSIWYG doc here, a programmer had to go through the WHOLE document by hand, and carefully sort out which was which, and then a copyeditor had to go and change the font on EACH affected word....ugh! The real world (of multi-author documents, of text that must survive its original venue and move forward from document to document) is filled with examples like this where the loss of the logical structure of the document bags you. The second is that virtually no one with a Mac on their desk has the barest smidgeon of training in matters relating to document layout and design[*]. Fonts , point sizes, leading, page layout, etc., are chosen at random or on a whim, typographical conventions are invented on the fly. Is the page too black (and so will turn readers away)? Is it hard to skim the document (and so any reader who is bored in the first page will be obliged to dump the document)? Does the document help focus the reader's (presumably limited) attention on the really important parts? Does the document shout "We're not very professional here"? Judging from most of the stuff produced here at BBN, the prevailing attitude is that having read a whole bunch qualifies them to "we don't know art but know what we like" [just as, I suppose, they would argue that a lifetime of watching movies qualifies them to direct one]; the 'meta issues' (like "does the document really DO what it was intended for?") is not even a consideration. [*] As I've pointed out here at BBN, and as is painfully apparent to the editorial staff who have to SEE a lot of the crap we write, very few of us are even competent to deal with the basic *writing* style matters. Would these ideas be better served by longer or shorter paragraphs? Should they be described in running text or in a simple bulleted list? Should it be written in the present or future tense? Are the sentences too long and complicated? etc... It is amazing to get into an argument over point sizes with someone who seems not to be able to write a decent paragraph in the first place, but is filled to the brim with ironclad opinions about the proper way to PRESENT the sow's ear so as to silk-purse it. __ / ) Bernie Cosell /--< _ __ __ o _ BBN Sys & Tech, Cambridge, MA 02238 /___/_(<_/ (_/) )_(_(<_ cosell@bbn.com
truesdel@ics.uci.edu (Scott Truesdell) (07/24/89)
cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) writes: >There are two other major problems with WYSIWYG systems: > ... you start on a doc that will talk about Unix and decide, > for no really good reason [you're not really trained in all this, > after all] to use boldface for Unix commands AND Unix file names. > You run off a proof of your document and realize that this is was a > loser of a decision: how do you change it now? In TeX, you would > have had \filename and \command and just tweaked one or the other. > When this happened with a WYSIWYG doc here, a programmer had to go > through the WHOLE document by hand, and carefully sort out which > was which, and then a copyeditor had to go and change the font on > EACH affected word....ugh! The real world (of multi-author > documents, of text that must survive its original venue and move > forward from document to document) is filled with examples like > this where the loss of the logical structure of the document bags > you. I don't use it, but I'm pretty sure that FullWrite Professional for the Macintosh addresses these issues fairly completely. > The second is that virtually no one with a Mac on their desk has ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ I would call this an extreme statement, but the point is well taken. > the barest smidgeon of training in matters relating to document layout > and design[*]. Fonts , point sizes, leading, page layout, etc., are > chosen at random or on a whim, typographical conventions are > invented on the fly. Is the page too black (and so will turn Once again: "The Power to be Your Worst"! > readers away)? Is it hard to skim the document (and so any reader > who is bored in the first page will be obliged to dump the > document)? Does the document help focus the reader's (presumably > limited) attention on the really important parts? Does the > document shout "We're not very professional here"? Judging from > most of the stuff produced here at BBN, the prevailing attitude is > that having read a whole bunch qualifies them to "we don't know art > but know what we like" [just as, I suppose, they would argue that a > lifetime of watching movies qualifies them to direct one]; the > 'meta issues' (like "does the document really DO what it was > intended for?") is not even a consideration. > [*] As I've pointed out here at BBN, and as is painfully > apparent to the editorial staff who have to SEE a lot of the > crap we write, very few of us are even competent to deal with > the basic *writing* style matters. Would these ideas be better > served by longer or shorter paragraphs? Should they be > described in running text or in a simple bulleted list? Should > it be written in the present or future tense? Are the > sentences too long and complicated? etc... It is amazing to > get into an argument over point sizes with someone who seems > not to be able to write a decent paragraph in the first place, > but is filled to the brim with ironclad opinions about the > proper way to PRESENT the sow's ear so as to silk-purse it. It has been pointed out before that "The Power to be Your Best" is not mutually exclusive to "the power to be your worst". Writing is hard enough without having to become a typographer thrown on top of the other requirements. In fact, for any production requirement, having the writing of text and the designing of the document handled by the same person is virtually unheard of. Copy writers should not be allowed near any software which allows them to embed formatting commands. This is a job for the designers and typesetters. I have virtually NO experience in production professional writing environments, but in some smaller "Desktop Publishing" job shops I've consulted for, the writers input straight text only. When they are done and it has been proofed for spelling, content, readability, etc., it is ported over to Macs for formatting/typesetting. If you set the copy writers in front of Macs, 2 things happen: * 1. The job take 2 to 3 times longer than need be. * 2. There is no consistancy of style. Anyway, there is nothing new about this problem. one other point I picked up from reading Bernie's posting: If the people doing the work can't write well, WHAT ARE THEY DOING WORKING THERE!?!? Writing isn't simple; it shouldn't be left to simpletons. -- Scott Truesdell
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (07/25/89)
In article <43132@bbn.COM> cosell@BBN.COM (Bernie Cosell) writes: >}And even more expensive and sophisticated programs like MS-WORD do >}not act as WYSIWYG systems while you are entering and editing text -- Most will let you see the line and page breaks as you go, though with the formatting set for the chosen fonts. The graphic previews take some time, so they are only done on demand. >}And in any case, give me systems which store my files as flat text files, >}with formatting instructions embedded where they belong, rather than systems >}like WORD, which have their own proprietary file format which is difficult >}to decipher and convert to something else, or to rapidly modify using such >}tools as sed and awk. Conversion tools would be a simple solution to this. Most WP programs offer conversion to/from a few other programs - mostly DCA in the IBM PC world. >There are two other major problems with WYSIWYG systems: > > they lose most of the logical structure of the document, and so > impede its text being used in other contexts (where the printing > rules may be different). OK, how do I print a TeX or nroff document on a system that has neither? > The newer WYSIWYG systems (like Word 4.0) > address this to some extent, but it is still fairly marginal by the > standards of the really powerful highlevel markup systems [for > example: you start on a doc that will talk about Unix and decide, > for no really good reason [you're not really trained in all this, > after all] to use boldface for Unix commands AND Unix file names. > You run off a proof of your document and realize that this is was a > loser of a decision: how do you change it now? In TeX, you would > have had \filename and \command and just tweaked one or the other. > When this happened with a WYSIWYG doc here, a programmer had to go > through the WHOLE document by hand, and carefully sort out which > was which, and then a copyeditor had to go and change the font on > EACH affected word....ugh! Are you saying that an incompetent can't screw up a troff or TeX document to the point where an experienced person must fix it up by hand? WP 5.0, MS Word, and probably others have named styles that can (and should) be used to set the attributes within documents. Changing the style definitions changes the formatting everywhere it is used in the document. The real problem here is the WP and Word are simple enough to use that most people will read the manual and get the job done without having someone teach them the "right" way to do it. > The real world (of multi-author > documents, of text that must survive its original venue and move > forward from document to document) is filled with examples like > this where the loss of the logical structure of the document bags > you. Current WP's support red-lining, outlining, embedded comments, file-locking on lans, including sub-documents, and many other things that are awkward with the toolbox approach. A handy technique with WP 5, for example is to place all style definitions in a master document with all the text in subdocuments. You can then produce dramatically different effects by modifying only the master document. If portions of the text only require setting the font and margins (no font changes or underlining within the block) you can include an ordinary text file as a subdocument and wrap the style around it in the master document. > The second is that virtually no one with a Mac on their desk has > the barest smidgeon of training in matters relating to document layout > and design. There is no substitute for training, but it can be greatly reduced by providing some standard styles and teaching people to use them. Then if someone else wants to tweak things, it can be done easily, perhaps even by loading a different (but also standard) set of style definitions. Les Mikesell
clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (07/27/89)
In article <9053@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: >In article <43132@bbn.COM> cosell@BBN.COM (Bernie Cosell) writes: >> they lose most of the logical structure of the document, and so >> impede its text being used in other contexts (where the printing >> rules may be different). >OK, how do I print a TeX or nroff document on a system that has neither? The same way with WP documents when your DOS machine doesn't have it either ;-) Actually, it's quite easy, given that the system has *something* similar to TeX or nroff. Usually close to impossible with a WP document. Troff or TeX input is *plain* ASCII - you can copy the files to any machine and convert them (or at least read the text) easily with a text editor. Eg: the time it took me under 2 hours to convert my 60 page thesis from eqn/tbl/troff -ms to IBM Script/GML on an EBCDIC (IBM VM/CMS) machine - and I had been using Script for less than a day at the time. Try to do that with a WP file! However, you completely missed his point. TeX and [nt]roff documents tend to be (strong tendancy) printer independent. Thus, whether I print to a Postscript engine with full graphics support, or an ASR33 which doesn't even have lowercase, the output will look as similar as it is possible for it to be given the limitations of the printer without you doing anything except specify which printer. That's what he meant by "rules". My experience with things like WP is that you have to fiddle the document for each printer to get it to come out at all. Eg: you select font 1 in your document.... Um, well, that's 10 point Roman italic on the HPLJ K cartridge, 14 point landscape AvantGarde on a HPLJII, and inverse-video Kanji on the Postscript printer. It can take hours to simply route one document from one printer to another (and complaints from the customer that that *&^^%&^( WP package that *he* *insisted* on having doesn't work). [Chris Torek said one of the drawbacks of TeX/troff is that they'll do something even with line noise - that's also part of their strength - they'll do something reasonable even with text with no formatting directives whatsoever. Feeding line noise into WP is more likely to simply crash your machine ;-)] -- Chris Lewis, R.H. Lathwell & Associates: Elegant Communications Inc. UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Phone: (416)-595-5425
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (07/28/89)
In article <1989Jul26.184314.22495@eci386.uucp> clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes: >Troff or TeX input is *plain* ASCII - you can copy the files >to any machine and convert them (or at least read the text) easily >with a text editor. Eg: the time it took me under 2 hours to convert >my 60 page thesis from eqn/tbl/troff -ms to IBM Script/GML on an EBCDIC >(IBM VM/CMS) machine - and I had been using Script for less than a day >at the time. Try to do that with a WP file! Umm, how about using the included WP to DCA conversion, then looking for a DCA to whatever conversion on the mainframe side? But seriously, where are you going to be that you can't find a PC these days, and you can carry the program around on a floppy just as easily as the document. If this is a real problem, just get a 10 lb. laptop and carry the whole machine (try that with your mainframe!). If you want plain ascii you can always write the file out that way and lose only the formatting, or you can do some magic search and replace commands (or macros) to change WP's formatting codes into your favorite ascii characters. >However, you completely missed his point. TeX and [nt]roff documents >tend to be (strong tendancy) printer independent. No, I addressed this point but perhaps you missed it because you are not aware of the changes that have happend to PC wordprocessors in the last year or two. Word >4.0, WP 5.0, (and probably WS 5.0 and several others) do provide this capability both by allowing measurement (vs. character) based formatting and allowing the use of redefinable styles instead of imbedding "real" font names and measurements throughout the document. >Thus, whether I print to >a Postscript engine with full graphics support, or an ASR33 which doesn't >even have lowercase, the output will look as similar as it is possible for >it to be given the limitations of the printer without you doing anything >except specify which printer. That's what he meant by "rules". No problem with WP 5.0 if your printer is one of the 700 or so models that are supported or you feel up to hacking your own driver. *And* the graphics page preview will represent the output on the intended device instead of the best-fit for your screen (size-wise, anyway - they don't know everything about font shapes). >My experience with things like WP is that you have to fiddle the document >for each printer to get it to come out at all. Eg: you select font 1 in >your document.... Yes, I thought so, you are talking about WP 4.2 or earlier. Well times have changed. WP 5.0 knows all about font sizes now and margins, tabs, positioning, etc. are done using measurments, making it trivial to use different fonts (which you now select by name and point size or if you want to stay generic you can use "small", "large", etc. that are mapped according to the printer). Better yet, use styles for everything which makes it trivial to modify all of your formatting as long as it is consistent. Also, since you can search/replace codes as well as text, it is pretty simple to make global changes even if you weren't consistent. Les Mikesell
ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (07/28/89)
In article <9091@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: >In article <1989Jul26.184314.22495@eci386.uucp> clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes: > >a DCA to whatever conversion on the mainframe side? But seriously, >where are you going to be that you can't find a PC these days, and you >can carry the program around on a floppy just as easily as the document. >If this is a real problem, just get a 10 lb. laptop and carry the whole >machine (try that with your mainframe!). Since when does one need a mainframe to run **IX and the text processing tools associated with it? The same AT clone that will run MiSerable DOS will run **IX. Several of the high horsepower portables have been advertised as UNIX machines. >consistent. Also, since you can search/replace codes as well as text, it >is pretty simple to make global changes even if you weren't consistent. Maybe WP has (finally) developed a search-replace that allows you to replace text AND codes, but this is still an unusual feature in PeeCee word processors. Typically, they are extremely restrictive in what can go into a search and replace operation. Closure and conditional replacement are still more unusual. Moreover, you have to ~know~ what the underlying codes are. Maybe your experience is different from mine, but I am frequently asked by colleagues to make rough translations of documents from one format to another. Many PeeCee word processors do not tell you the control codes or format used even for common operations such as underlining or super/subscripting. Typically you have to find this information out by printing a text and comparing the raw source run through an octal or hex dump program. Even companies specializing in the writing of conversion software have a hell of a time on this point. (As an exercise, try to figure out the control codes used by MicroShaft Weird.) In contrast, compare the task of changing, for example, bold to italics, in an nroff/troff document, with what it takes in most PeeCee word processors: g/\\fB/s//\\fI/g or g/\\fB/s//\\fI/gc If you've used macros such as .BO or .IT, the task is even simpler. As further tests (based on the sort of thing I am called upon to do by my publishers), compare the number of strokes required by the usual word processor to (a) switch from footnotes to endnotes; (b) change the margins in an nnn (50 <= nnn <= 500) page document; (c) properly place footnotes that require more than 1/2 of a physical page. (To forestall the argument that only a hacker would appreciate vi/nroff, I would note that I teach modern Japanese history.) Earl H. Kinmonth History Department University of California, Davis 916-752-1636 (voice, fax [2300-0800 PDT]) 916-752-0776 secretary (bitnet) ehkinmonth@ucdavis.edu (uucp) ucbvax!ucdavis!ucdked!cck (telnet or 916-752-7920) cc-dnet.ucdavis.edu [128.120.2.251] request ucdked, login as guest, no password
clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (07/29/89)
In article <9091@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: >In article <1989Jul26.184314.22495@eci386.uucp> clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes: >Umm, how about using the included WP to DCA conversion, then looking for >a DCA to whatever conversion on the mainframe side? DCA to SCRIPT? argh! >But seriously, Me too. >where are you going to be that you can't find a PC these days, At home. In our office on the PC that doesn't have WP.... >If this is a real problem, just get a 10 lb. laptop and carry the whole >machine (try that with your mainframe!). I'll go blind trying to read the screen... (actually, I'd rather run UNIX and vi/troff on the laptop) >Yes, I thought so, you are talking about WP 4.2 or earlier. Well times >have changed. Exactly. Now all we need is WP 5.0 ported to UNIX. (Too bad UNIX WP is such a pig.) -- Chris Lewis, R.H. Lathwell & Associates: Elegant Communications Inc. UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Phone: (416)-595-5425
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (07/29/89)
In article <26726@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes: >Maybe WP has (finally) developed a search-replace that allows you to >replace text AND codes, but this is still an unusual feature in PeeCee >word processors. There is only one point I am trying to make here. If you haven't seen the current crop of programs, don't judge them by earlier versions. Things really have changed. Not perfect yet, but what is? >Typically, they are extremely restrictive in what >can go into a search and replace operation. Closure and conditional >replacement are still more unusual. Moreover, you have to ~know~ what >the underlying codes are. WP 5.0 lets you enter the same key sequence that you would use to generate a code (and shows the choices as you go) when you enter the search/replace items, and shows the same thing on the screen that you would see using the "reveal-codes" mode. MS-Word has some very different concepts about formatting that make it more difficult to think in terms of "codes" but easier to use style definitions and avoid the need to change any imbedded formatting. >Maybe your experience is different from mine, but I am frequently asked >by colleagues to make rough translations of documents from one format >to another. I used to do a lot of this also. Lately we have only used WP and Pagemaker (which knows about WP and some other formats). >In contrast, compare the task of changing, for example, bold to >italics, in an nroff/troff document, with what it takes in most PeeCee >word processors: Word and WP (and probably others) let you make such global changes. >If you've used macros such as .BO or .IT, the task is even simpler. Likewise if you use WP or Word styles. >As further tests (based on the sort of thing I am called upon to do by >my publishers), compare the number of strokes required by the usual >word processor to (a) switch from footnotes to endnotes; Trivial in MS word (<esc>FDLE<return>), difficult in WP, since both can exist in the same document. It would probably require a macro to find the next footnote, delete the text, create an endnote and yank back the text. >(b) change the >margins in an nnn (50 <= nnn <= 500) page document; No problem unless they change all over the place - even then it is trivial if styles are used. >(c) properly place >footnotes that require more than 1/2 of a physical page. No problem with WP - haven't tried it with Word, but wouldn't expect any trouble. >(To forestall the argument that only a hacker would appreciate >vi/nroff, I would note that I teach modern Japanese history.) Actually, I like vi and wish the PC programs had real regex support, but things like redline and strikeout support are more practical (where the codes and/or affected text can be deleted in one command). BTW, you might like the 1500 character character set that WP 5.0 uses. Les Mikesell
cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (07/29/89)
In article <9102@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: >In article <26726@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes: > >>(To forestall the argument that only a hacker would appreciate >>vi/nroff, I would note that I teach modern Japanese history.) > >Actually, I like vi and wish the PC programs had real regex support, >but things like redline and strikeout support are more practical >(where the codes and/or affected text can be deleted in one command). >BTW, you might like the 1500 character character set that WP 5.0 uses. 1500 characters doesn't amount to diddly squat as far as Japanese goes. My Japanese word processor has 6000 plus, and that still doesn't give me full coverage. I'm saving my pennies for a Sony Work Station with kanji vi and troff. I'm still unconvinced about the wonders of WP 5.0. One of my colleagues got it for his wife because she needed full Greek (not mathematicians Greek - full modern and classical.) It does it. Sort of. But it took him weeks on the phone to find out what he needed in the way of hardware to support it. It then took me three hours to figure out what the mushed mouth manual was trying to say to make the transition between roman and Greek scripts. My $700 NEC word processor (total price including 24 dot matrix printer and disk drive) can do more typographical things with 6000+ characters (it has stroked fonts) for Japanese (and English, and Russian, etc.) than WP does with English.... Just out of curiosity. Is there any logical pattern to WPs use of function keys? I go buggy trying to remember whether its alt/ctrl/shift or whatever....
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (08/01/89)
In article <4993@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes: >My $700 NEC word processor (total price including 24 dot matrix printer >and disk drive) can do more typographical things with 6000+ characters >(it has stroked fonts) for Japanese (and English, and Russian, etc.) >than WP does with English.... Somehow this doesn't surprise me... What does the N in NEC stand for? The graphics capability of WP can help out, though. If you can coax some other program to make a figure using HPGL plotting or several other formats, WP can convert it to a form that it can scale and position. >Just out of curiosity. Is there any logical pattern to WPs use of >function keys? I go buggy trying to remember whether its alt/ctrl/shift >or whatever.... No, but I've never seen an editor that had a logical pattern of commands, especially ones that use function keys. There is a decent built-in help command, though, so you only have to remember F3. Also, you can re-map the commands if you like. Les Mikesell
cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (08/02/89)
In article <9126@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: >In article <4993@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes: > >Somehow this doesn't surprise me... What does the N in NEC stand for? Maybe it stands for Norwegian. The documentation claims full support for Norwegian. :)
gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (08/03/89)
Re: Troff is great; look at all the books written in troff.
I believe a revolution is coming, and troff will be the first against
the wall (to be sacrificed).
Troff will die because of the t in it's name -- "Typesetter".
Typesetters are being replaced by laserprinters, which do a lot more.
Take a look at the output language of ditroff sometime. Here are the
only graphics objects in the language:
lines, thick lines (berkeley), circles, arcs, ellipses, and splines.
characters, fonts, font sizes.
Ask yourself,
(1) How do I shade objects with different patterns or continuous halftones?
(2) How do I draw thick objects in general?
(3) How do I label the y axis of a graph, using 90-degree rotated words?
(4) How would I label the arcs in a network flow graph with rotated letters?
(5) How would I draw a black box and then etch characters into it (in
reverse video?)
(6) How do I include halftone / binary / floyded images?
(7) How do I superimpose graphics objects on top of each other?
The macintosh (and postscript) have all these abilities. Troff has
none. All you need is a program to create these quickdraw/postscript
images, and then you may paste them into your favorite WYSWYG word
processor (mine is MS-Word, but Writenow, Fullwrite, Wordperfect, or
Macwrite work equally well), and print them out at full postscript
(300+ dpi) resolution. Face it, troff is an elephant, which deserves
respect, a gold watch, and retirement very soon.
Troff is also missing some formatting niceties, such as the ability to
wrap text around a picture, or lay out pages like PageMaker or other
page layout programs.
About the only thing troff does better than these word processors is
typeset mathematics. MS-Word typesets mathematics in an ugly fashion.
I have talked to some people at microsoft, and they are considering
improving MS-Word mathematics in Macintosh Word 5.0. Most other
macintosh word processors do no math at all, but you can "draw"
equations with one of a half-dozen equation-formatting desk
accessories and paste them in. Some of these do an excellent job.
I believe TeX will survive longer because its equation-formatting and
word-spacing ability is unparalleled. But it will eventually succomb
to the WYSWYG revolution, or its equations will be incorporated into a
WYSWYG editor.
If you want to have "a text stream I can ftp to my friends", then you
should think about postscript. Postscript makes a great archival
medium, as long as you treat the postscript file like a piece of
immutable preprinted paper. Why not mail that friend a postscript
master, and he can print it out on most of the laser printers in the
country.
Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gilliescharlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer) (08/04/89)
In article <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > I believe a revolution is coming, and troff will be the first against > the wall (to be sacrificed). Not that I am a great fan of troff, but NO widely used language ever dies. Look at COBOL. > I believe TeX will survive longer because its equation-formatting and > word-spacing ability is unparalleled. But it will eventually succomb > to the WYSWYG revolution, or its equations will be incorporated into a > WYSWYG editor. Au contraire. The ability to incorporate PostScript pictures in TeX or LaTeX documents, already supported by all (almost all?) versions of dvi2ps, makes TeX far more powerful than any WYSWYG system. Set the equations in TeX and then paste them into a WYSWYG document? Surely you are joking. This is a step back to the stone age. Why don't you just give up and use TeX? I've done lots of preprints and tech reports full of fancy graphics, all in TeX. It's a snap. The math looks beautiful and the graphics too.
cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (08/04/89)
In article <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > >Re: Troff is great; look at all the books written in troff. > >I believe a revolution is coming, and troff will be the first against >the wall (to be sacrificed). >(300+ dpi) resolution. Face it, troff is an elephant, which deserves >respect, a gold watch, and retirement very soon. > >Troff is also missing some formatting niceties, such as the ability to >wrap text around a picture, or lay out pages like PageMaker or other >page layout programs. At least some of the thing you are looking for can in fact be found in recent incarnations of troff such as that from Soft Quad Publishing and Mortice Kern Systems. Troff has an edge in more than mathematics. Try doing a legal paper where footnotes range up to several continuous pages. Try setting up a text so you can switch from single to multi-column presentation (with footnotes) in no more than one line of changed code.
rjc@don.uk.ac.ed (Richard Caley) (08/05/89)
In article <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >Troff is also missing some formatting niceties, such as the ability to >wrap text around a picture, To insert a comment from the other end ( ie. those who have to read this stuff ) -- why would anyone want to do this. It is a stupid idea. It is a great way to take your text and turn it into a piece of gibberish. The only thing I have seen which is worse is a magazine I used to read which had the habbit of printing things _over_ grey scale images. Yeuch. >I believe TeX will survive longer because its equation-formatting and >word-spacing ability is unparalleled. But it will eventually succomb >to the WYSWYG revolution, or its equations will be incorporated into a >WYSWYG editor. Ok, why do people think TeX is good for doing math? What am I missing? Why is it causing me hours of headaches to get LaTeX ( maybe plain TeX is better? ) to let me do other than trivial formulae in a semi-readable manner? WYSIWHG is even worse - that's what convinced me to try LaTeX . . . -- rjc@uk.ac.ed.aipna Have you hugged your Knnn today? rjc@uk.ac.ed.aipna "Politics! You can wrap it up in fancy ribbons, but you can't hide the smell" - Jack Barron
wnp@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Wolf Paul) (08/06/89)
In article <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >The macintosh (and postscript) have all these abilities. Troff has >none. All you need is a program to create these quickdraw/postscript >images, and then you may paste them into your favorite WYSWYG word >processor (mine is MS-Word, but Writenow, Fullwrite, Wordperfect, or >Macwrite work equally well), and print them out at full postscript >(300+ dpi) resolution. Face it, troff is an elephant, which deserves >respect, a gold watch, and retirement very soon. Ah, but if you create these things with a separate program and then paste them into your favorite word processor, then you should not exclude TROFF from that club: I can paste graphics into my troff input, and output them on a laser printer. >Troff is also missing some formatting niceties, such as the ability to >wrap text around a picture, or lay out pages like PageMaker or other >page layout programs. How so? with clever use of macros troff can wrap text around a picture and produce fully laid-out pages. Not on the screen, by moving objects around with a rodent, but no-one claimed that troff was WYSIaWYG -- it's wySiEwyg (what you SPECIFY is EXACTLY what you get :-) ). >About the only thing troff does better than these word processors is >typeset mathematics. MS-Word typesets mathematics in an ugly fashion. You can say that again, and the same is true of tables when using proportional fonts. >If you want to have "a text stream I can ftp to my friends", then you >should think about postscript. Postscript makes a great archival >medium, as long as you treat the postscript file like a piece of >immutable preprinted paper. Why not mail that friend a postscript >master, and he can print it out on most of the laser printers in the >country. Two comments on that: (1) he may be able to print it out JUST AS IS, but if he wanted to modify it, he would be hard pressed; and (2) I am not convinced that "most of the laser printers in the country" support Postscript. Would you care to support that statement with sales figures for the various Postscript brands versus the figures for HP LJ and clones? Wolf -- Wolf N. Paul * 3387 Sam Rayburn Run * Carrollton TX 75007 * (214) 306-9101 UUCP: {texbell, attctc, dalsqnt}!dcs!wnp DOMAIN: wnp@attctc.dallas.tx.us or wnp%dcs@texbell.swbt.com NOTICE: As of July 3, 1989, "killer" has become "attctc".
charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer) (08/06/89)
In article <1168@aipna.ed.ac.uk> rjc@don (Richard Caley) writes: > Ok, why do people think TeX is good for doing math? What am I missing? > Why is it causing me hours of headaches to get LaTeX ( maybe plain TeX > is better? ) to let me do other than trivial formulae in a semi-readable > manner? Because it is. In TeX or LaTeX or AMS TeX one can typeset mathematics better than it used to be done by hand except at a very few of the best publishing houses. Nothing else even comes close. I have seen two dozen students learn LaTeX here, and it does not seem to be difficult as long as there are some experienced users around to ask questions. If the LaTeX manual is your only source of information, that may be your problem. Read the sections on typesetting mathematics in the TeXbook. There's no need to switch to plain TeX, almost all of it works in LaTeX.
cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (08/06/89)
[attribution removed; don't get bent out of shape!] > >Troff is also missing some formatting niceties, such as the ability to > >wrap text around a picture, or lay out pages like PageMaker or other > >page layout programs. Maybe I'm an "ivory tower" intellectual out of touch with the world, but where, I ask, outside of PEOPLE magazine and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER, is the ability to wrap text around pictures of any consequence? I'm an historian. I've never seen an historical text that would have been better by virtue of having the text wrapped around pictures. I also did undergraduate work in electrical engineering and business. I can't imagine a situation where anything I read in these disciplines would have been improved, either in appearance or ability to transmit needed information, by having text wrapped around pictures. Indeed, the only places I've seen text wrapped around pictures is in (a) comic books; (b) shoppers and junk mailer inserts in newspapers. Is my education incomplete? Am I missing something? Will my colleagues suddenly stand up and applaud if I can wrap text around pictures? Will my students suddenly vote me teacher of the year if I can give them handouts with the syllabus wrapped around a picture of Hirohito (I teach Japanese history)? I have about three meters of shelf space devoted to various computer manuals and textbooks ranging from Aho and company on compilers to Sedgewick and others on algorithms. Am I intellectually lacking because I can't figure out how any of these would be improved by having text wrapped around the illustrations?
gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu (08/07/89)
/* Written 12:29 am Aug 6, 1989 by cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu in m.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.text */ > I'm an historian. I've never seen an historical text that would have > been better by virtue of having the text wrapped around pictures. Then you've never seen an illuminated manuscript. Remind me NEVER to take a course from you! Of course, this type of wrapping is trivial. The other type of wrapping (they kind that appears in our local newspaper "Features" section almost every day of the year) is more sophisticated. People should think before they jump. What I hear is, "If it's not done by troff, it must be unimportant" "Troff (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should all exchange troff documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)" I've also heard some intelligent points about footnotes, and multi-column flaws in some WYSWYG word processors (in MS-Word 4.0, 2 columns takes just 3 keypresses, and numerous footnotes seem to work just fine). I said troff math output looks better than MS-Word. I haven't looked at the output from any Mac equation editors, but they may well rival TeX (which is superior to troff). Having written math in BOTH troff and MS-Word, I find troff math is extremely hard to write, and very tricky to debug (like it took me over an hour to get a full-page equation with several cases to work). On a PC, you could *draw* the equation in about 5 minutes, despite its complicated nature.
mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (08/07/89)
>Maybe I'm an "ivory tower" intellectual out of touch with the world, >but where, I ask, outside of PEOPLE magazine and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER, >is the ability to wrap text around pictures of any consequence? Well, I have a book on cryogenic technology in which there are lots of photos and diagrams of stills for separating liquified gases. They are often one inch wide and a half or a whole page high. They wrapped text around them. This book would look mighty odd without that. A look in this morning's New York Times shows no examples of text from one article wrapped all the way around a picture; pictures are always butted up against the edge of the space for a particular article. But of course text as a whole snakes all over the place. Doug McDonald
charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer) (08/08/89)
In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > I find troff math is extremely hard to write, and very tricky to debug > (like it took me over an hour to get a full-page equation with several > cases to work). Ah yes, now I see your problem. A full-page equation, literally? No wonder you're having problems. Try defining some of the terms that have independent meaning so that it can be reduced to reasonable size. No one bothers to read a monster like that. Have you ever seen one in a real math book? > On a PC, you could *draw* the equation in about 5 minutes, despite its > complicated nature. And I bet it was still unreadable and ugly. No offense intended, but I hate seeing papers containing stuff like that.
grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (08/08/89)
In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
Then you've never seen an illuminated manuscript. Remind me NEVER to
take a course from you! Of course, this type of wrapping is trivial.
The other type of wrapping (they kind that appears in our local
newspaper "Features" section almost every day of the year) is more
sophisticated.
----
I think that a fundemental problem is the documents people are intending to
write. Few scientific papers look good with wrapped text, illuiminations,
etc. Few editions of Time/Newsweek/etc look good without them.
Perhaps different tools are needed? Lamport has a good point when he says
``latex lets you worry about content, not form'' -- Time and Newsweek
and your local paper often worry more about form than content.
--
"If it's not done by troff, it must be unimportant"
"Troff (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should
all exchange troff documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)"
--
"PostScript (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should
all exchange PostScript documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)"
It's easy to words in peoples mouths.
---
I said troff math output looks better than MS-Word. I haven't looked
at the output from any Mac equation editors, but they may well rival TeX
(which is superior to troff). Having written math in BOTH troff and
MS-Word, I find troff math is extremely hard to write, and very tricky
to debug (like it took me over an hour to get a full-page equation
with several cases to work). On a PC, you could *draw* the equation
in about 5 minutes, despite its complicated nature.
---
Overall, your point is well taken. There are times when I've had to
beat LaTeX over the head to make it do exactly what I want to do.
Thats' why I've written TeX previewers - it reduces the cycletime of
making niggling little formatting changes. However, one need not throw
out the baby with the bathwater.
I think two-view (or multi-view) editing of documents is the right
approach. At times, I want to view someting as straight text & use
Emacs to bash on it. At other times, I'd like to see a structured
representation of the document to move it around on the display, or
e.g., force footnotes and their references to be on the same page.
If one wants to grouse about e.g., the problems of TeX, one should
grouse that it's a ``single input stream'' environment. The command
definitions should be in another file/area/marked thing, and text
should be text. This is difficult to do with, e.g. the handy little
macros we all write to avoid typing things, but it would make two-view
systems easier to deal with.
In this sense, The Publisher by ArborTeX is, in my mind, headed in a
good direction. They also have a table editor and equation editor.
The table editor I can understand; tables are visual things, and you
should be able to lay it out ``just so'' -- equations on the other
hand, I find faster to enter inline (which you can still do in The
Publisher).cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (08/08/89)
In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > >> I'm an historian. I've never seen an historical text that would have >> been better by virtue of having the text wrapped around pictures. > >Then you've never seen an illuminated manuscript. Remind me NEVER to >take a course from you! Of course, this type of wrapping is trivial. (a) A slip of the tongue. By historical text I meant historical monograph (something written about history). (b) My specialty is modern Japan. If you take one of my courses expecting to learn about medieval Europe, you should be prepared for what you get.... (c) Whether you find illuminated manuscripts more attractive depends on your taste. I find these things a form of medieval high kitsch.
rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) (08/08/89)
In article <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu>, gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > Re: Troff is great; look at all the books written in troff. That much is fair - there have been a lot of books done with it, but... > Troff will die because of the t in it's name -- "Typesetter". > Typesetters are being replaced by laserprinters, which do a lot more. Hello?? Typesetters are NOT being replaced by laser printers. Laser printers are OK for moderate-quality output (and they keep getting better) but in the world of serious printing a laser printer is how you get "proof" output that's destined for a phototypesetter. Let's also consider another side of this: Just what is it that a laser printer can do that a typesetter cannot? Seems to me that laser printers are mostly mimicking (photo)typesetter capabilities. > Take a look at the output language of ditroff sometime. Here are the > only graphics objects in the language: > > lines, thick lines (berkeley), circles, arcs, ellipses, and splines. > characters, fonts, font sizes. If you think this somehow condemns troff, consider that previous versions of troff had only horizontal and vertical lines, and lacked circles, arcs, ellipses, and splines. Lo and behold, troff is software and can be modi- fied. (It can even be completely rewritten--and was.) > Ask yourself, [various questions about how to deal with shading, halftones, text other than horizontal, etc.] The questions were mostly good ones - things you might like to do (if the output device can handle it). Some of them will probably show up in future versions of troff as it becomes clear how to express the concepts at the lower level. For the time being, if you can't do it in troff, you include a bit of PostScript (my choice) or whatever. OK, I'm conservative here, but I'd rather have the new stuff done with escapes until we know how to fit it in, than to have troff get buggered up with all the half-baked cutesy featureitis that afflicts so-called "modern" word processing and desktop publishing. > ...Face it, troff is an elephant, which deserves > respect, a gold watch, and retirement very soon. Sure, and the same can be said about FORTRAN/C/COBOL, UNIX, etc...but until something comes along that's good enough to replace them, we make do with what we have, so that we don't have to give up the useful stuff to get the frills. > I believe TeX will survive longer because its equation-formatting and > word-spacing ability is unparalleled. But it will eventually succomb > to the WYSWYG revolution, or its equations will be incorporated into a > WYSWYG editor. There are some of us who aren't likely to get on the WYSIWYG bandwagon at any time in the near future simply because we think it's the wrong approach. I no more want to edit WYSIWYG than I want to fix programs by editing the object files. Personal bias, but I'm not alone. -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com uucp: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd (303)449-2870 ...Simpler is better.
bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger) (08/08/89)
In article <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: |If you want to have "a text stream I can ftp to my friends", then you |should think about postscript. Postscript makes a great archival |medium, as long as you treat the postscript file like a piece of |immutable preprinted paper. Why not mail that friend a postscript |master, and he can print it out on most of the laser printers in the |country. You are dreaming if you think most of the laser printers are PostScript. Do you know how many LaserJets and--for that matter-- LN03's and 6670's are out there? OK, I'm talking through my hat, too, but I'd be *very* surprised if I'm wrong . . . -- -- Brian, the Man from Babble-on. ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts -- "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" -- THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
hugo@griggs.dartmouth.edu (Peter Su) (08/08/89)
In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > >/* Written 12:29 am Aug 6, 1989 by cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu in m.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.text */ >> I'm an historian. I've never seen an historical text that would have >> been better by virtue of having the text wrapped around pictures. Amen. >"Troff (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should >all exchange troff documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)" > Okay, I will not claim that troff is the be-all and end-all of text processing systems. I won't even claim that it is any good. I will claim that it is more powerful an flexible than any of the pretty toys you can run on the Macintosh or other PCs. I don't even like troff, but I'd rather use it than MS Word, Macwrite, Word Perfect, or any of that dreck. >Comments about math and multiple columns. Ok, let's get away from kid's stuff. Most available programs are pretty good at layout. But, layout isn't all there is to a good text processor. In fact, layout is arguably the LEAST important feature of a good text processor. A good text processor should let you do useful things to your text easily. To that end, no PC based text processor I have used is any good, because I have never used one that could do any of the following, relatively easy things: 1) Generate bibliographies from a set of bibliography database queries (i.e. like refer or BibTeX). These should be able to be formatted in many different ways, depending on the document style. 2) Allow the user to label sections, figures, theorems, equations, whatever, with symbolic names and then use those names to generate cross references. Like, "see Figure \name{foo}" generates "see Figure 2 on page 30..." Oh, these cross references should be allowed to be numberedany way I like (i.e. by chapter, section, subsection, part, *anything*), and also formatted any way I like. 3) *Easily* split a document up into "modules" and have the capability to only format selected parts when I need to. Of course, this only applies to batch type formatters, but none of the interactive formatters allow you to link documents easily. Like in Word, you can do it, but you have to keep track of the starting page numbers for each document manually, this is *stupid*. 4) Allow the user to give symbolic names to frequenty used constructs (say, some mathematical notation) so that if that construct happens to change, he/she only has to change the definition of the name in one place, not all over his/her document. Really, no text editor alive can munch through say, 1000 pages of text doing a global replace without being *real* slow about it. And what if I'm changing, say "g(x) sub x sup y" to "g(x) sup x sub y"... or something similarly hideous? 5) Conditionally generate text in applications other than mail merge. 6) Automatically number sections of text in arbitrary ways. Like, say I want my Chapters numbered "a,b,c..." then sections "I, II , III..." then the rest "1,2,3..." can your favorite word processor do this? What if later i decide that I don't like that scheme and want to change to all arabic numerals. Suppose I want to number things by chapter and section, but I don't want a dot to separate the section number from the chapter number, so chapter 1 section 1 is "11"...(I helped to format a book where this was what the author wanted)? 7) Search and replace on regular expressions... I can go on and on. The gist of this is that I do not really care if the latest wiz bang 'word processor' on the block can wrap text around an arbitrary b-spline, or include 8 bit gray scaled images with my text. I don't care if can let me edit text formatted in 8 columns, each in a different type face with different line spacing. All those CPU cycles are being wasted displaying information that is not important until after I have written my text, and I don't want to think about until then! Meanwhile, there are no cycles left for useful, text oriented functions like the ones I mentioned above. And, to quote Leslie Lamport, without permission: "As you are writing your docement, you should be concerned with its logical structure, not its visual appearence." or "LaTeX was designed to free you from formatting concerns, allowing you to concentrate on writing. If, while writing, you spend a lot of time worrying about form, you are probably misusing LateX." I claim that WYSIWIG are overly concerned with form, and no concerned enough about with the logical operations that result in the form that you want. I will also claim that LaTeX isn't the ultimate answer. It has its problems, and some of them are BIG, but I think that right now it is the least awful of all the evils. Thank you for listening, Pete hugo@sunapee.dartmouth.edu
Horne-Scott@cs.yale.edu (Scott Horne) (08/08/89)
In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu>, gillies@m.cs writes: > > /* Written 12:29 am Aug 6, 1989 by cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu in m.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.text */ > > I'm an historian. I've never seen an historical text that would have ^^^^^^^^^^ > > been better by virtue of having the text wrapped around pictures. ^^^^^^^^^^^ > > Then you've never seen an illuminated manuscript. Remind me NEVER to > take a course from you! This is not at all what he said. See what I've underlined above. --Scott Scott Horne Undergraduate programmer, Yale CS Dept Facility horne@cs.Yale.edu ...!{harvard,cmcl2,decvax}!yale!horne Home: 203 789-0877 SnailMail: Box 7196 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520 Work: 203 432-1260 Summer residence: 175 Dwight St, New Haven, CT Dare I speak for the amorphous gallimaufry of intellectual thought called Yale?
spage@cup.portal.com (S spage Page) (08/14/89)
Please don't send out messages of the form "Just try doing XYZ on your (yuck)
system" unless YOU REALLY UNDERSTAND THE OTHER SYSTEM. You're just clogging
up the net.
I recently switched from ditroff heavy-hitter central (Sun Microsystems
tech pubs) to PC land. Yes, it was a shock, yes it is different. But snap
judgements and opinions that try to characterize the entire PC WP arena are
going to be wrong! Don't trust anyone who pontificates about some package
unless s/he has spent months working with it (this especially applies to PC
software reviewers, whose opinions are mostly worthless).
The dynamics of the DOS software industry (same O/S functionality for years,
single-process, 640K RAM limit, corporate buyers, herd mentality) have
resulted in huge, monolithic, complex, many-layered standalone packages
competing in check-list wars. The feature list for Microsoft Word for the PC
is about 7 pages long! The program is so vast that it mocks attempts to
characterize it. And before you can even make sense of someone's claim that
it's really great/it really sucks, you have to know:
o is he using direct formatting? making his own style sheet? using
a pre-defined style sheet?
o Is he using the mouse or keyboard interface?
o Is he displaying in text mode or graphics mode?
o Is he in screen mode, show-line-breaks mode, or show-layout mode?
o Is he using Word's built-in features, using Word's predefined macros,
writing his own macros, doing post-processing of Rich Text Format, or
using add-on utilities?
o Is he editing 5 pages or 500?
I could sit here and blab about how great Word is (it's sorta great, actually).
But unless you understood the product and my use of it enough to make sense of
the above issues, I would not be communicating with you. For this reason
I've given up trying to figure out if Word Perfect is a better package -- I
don't have a week free to start formulating the right questions. The same
is starting to happen with graphics packages: they are becoming too rich, too
all-encompassing, too self-centered to converse about.
I apologize for going on at length on such a nihilistic theme ("Discourse is
feeble and futile"). I think a better way to structure this discussion is
"What should the ideal system be" with occasional informative "Well, here's
how TeX/Word/troff does it" interjections.
=S Page GO Corporation
P.S. To switch column formats in PC Word:
<Ctrl-Z> if you've defined a macro "<Ctrl-Z>".
<Ctrl-Enter><alt-MD> if you have a style sheet with a multi-
column division style called "MD"
<Ctrl-Enter><esc>fdml<tab>5
if you do it with direct formatting
<Ctrl-m>c if you use the predefined macro to change
number of columns.
...
...
Is it harder or easier in Word than in troff? Meaningless question??plunkett@prcrs.UUCP (Scott Plunkett) (08/15/89)
> ...Face it, troff is an elephant, which deserves > respect, a gold watch, and retirement very soon. When the following can be done as easily with a WYSIWYG then troff may be retired: cat <<! | tbl | troff ." version %I% . .TS center, box; c s s c c c l r l. `pwd` _ Name Size Owner _ `ls -l | awk '{print $9 "\t" $5 "\t" $3}'` .TE ! Scott Plunkett PRC Realty Systems, Inc. ..uunet!prcrs!plunkett
gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (08/15/89)
Re: "Troff is great because it lets me pass a document to my friend
and he can revise it, i.e. we can work on it together".
Answer: Well, maybe he cannot. Are you aware that troff layout
depends heavily on the type of output printer? Do you realize that
all your widow control (figure placement) depends on where the page
breaks end up? Troff supports at least 3 types of printers (Imagen,
Postscript, HP Laserjet), and each kind has different character widths.
In fact, this week I reformatted an Impress document in Postscript,
and the output was lousy. To share this document (original in
Impress) with someone using a Postscript printer would result in a war
over equation and figure placement.
This is a general problem not confined to troff. So don't assume that
troff solves this problem -- it does not. Nobody has solved this
problem.
On the other hand, using a device-independent standard like
postscript, at least you can pass a hardcopy to a friend, and
information will not be redistributed or mangled among the pages (ever
see what happen to a table when it crosses a page?)
Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gilliesgrunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (08/17/89)
In article <77900019@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
Answer: Well, maybe he cannot. Are you aware that troff layout
depends heavily on the type of output printer? Do you realize that
This is a general problem not confined to troff. So don't assume that
troff solves this problem -- it does not. Nobody has solved this
problem.
--
Not true - The format output for TeX/LaTeX, DVI, was designed to be
device independent. An TeX has an internal fixed-point rational math
library used to insure *exactly* the same results on different
devices, at least as far as placement goes. In fact, you can't call a
TeX implementation `TeX' unless it passes something called the ``trip
test'' that insures that your implementation matches others.
The only variability is in fonts & device resolution. You can run with
blacker/darker fonts & it'll look slightly different.henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/17/89)
In article <77900019@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >On the other hand, using a device-independent standard like >postscript, at least you can pass a hardcopy to a friend, and >information will not be redistributed or mangled among the pages... Of course, it may still look hideous if he hasn't got the same fonts. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
woods@robohack.UUCP (08/18/89)
In article <77900019@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > > Answer: Well, maybe he cannot. Are you aware that troff layout > depends heavily on the type of output printer? Do you realize that > all your widow control (figure placement) depends on where the page > breaks end up? Troff supports at least 3 types of printers (Imagen, > Postscript, HP Laserjet), and each kind has different character widths. Actually, ditroff supports an infinite number of high quality printers and typesetters, as well as an infinite number of graphics devices. You see it is device independent, and only requires a description of the device in order to produce output that may be directly translated into codes for that device. > In fact, this week I reformatted an Impress document in Postscript, > and the output was lousy. To share this document (original in > Impress) with someone using a Postscript printer would result in a war > over equation and figure placement. > > This is a general problem not confined to troff. So don't assume that > troff solves this problem -- it does not. Nobody has solved this > problem. Troff solves this problem most elegantly. With appropriate use of displays, and user exits, troff will do its very best to make good use of any output device specified. All you have to do is describe the rules you would use to place a figure or table on the page. If this is done sufficiently well, troff will always make the right decision. If you need to break your own rules, provide options for the macro. > On the other hand, using a device-independent standard like > postscript, at least you can pass a hardcopy to a friend, and > information will not be redistributed or mangled among the pages (ever > see what happen to a table when it crosses a page?) Ah, I think you've missed the point! While PostScript may indeed be a device independent page description language, it is not often used in such a manner so as to be style, layout, and composition independent. Troff, if used carefully, makes the job of being style, layout, and composition independent much easier, while still retaining device independence. I don't think PostScript even contains the mechanisms to deal with the higher level concepts of text processing, though I suppose someone will write PostScript code to prove me wrong. Why not write a set of PostScript functions to emulate LaTeX? I don't even know it it would be possible. If so, does that mean PostScript is superior? I don't think so. Is assembler superior to C? Is this a good analogy? Troff's fault is that it requires somewhat more work than most people like to do. Perhaps TeX with an extensible macro package would be better. I don't know, as I've not had the pleasure of learning to use TeX yet. -- Greg A. Woods woods@{robohack,gate,tmsoft,ontmoh,utgpu,gpu.utcs.Toronto.EDU,utorgpu.BITNET} +1-416-443-1734 [h] +1-416-595-5425 [w] Toronto, Ontario; CANADA
freek@mel.fwi.uva.nl (Freek Wiedijk) (08/21/89)
In article <152@prcrs.UUCP> plunkett@prcrs.UUCP (Scott Plunkett) writes: >When the following can be done as easily with a WYSIWYG then troff >may be retired: > > cat <<! | tbl | troff [omitted] > `ls -l | awk '{print $9 "\t" $5 "\t" $3}'` > .TE > ! Of course, this is much easier in a WYSIWYG (operating) system! Simply say: Print Directory... from the "File" menu in the Finder. Would you be so kind to retire troff now for me? :-) :-) :-) By the way: in order to make this work, I had to say '{print $8 "\t" $4 "\t" $3}' instead of '{print $9 "\t" $5 "\t" $3}'. Was this my fault, your fault or troff's fault? :-) :-) :-) Greetings, Freek "the Pistol Major" Wiedijk Path: uunet!fwi.uva.nl!freek #P:+/ = #+/P?*+/ = i<<*+/P?*+/ = +/i<<**P?*+/ = +/(i<<*P?)*+/ = +/+/(i<<*P?)**
spencer@eecs.umich.edu (Spencer W. Thomas) (08/21/89)
Greg A. Woods spends a lot of time convincing us that troff can do anything (in particular, it can do any page layout task one would desire). In response, I quote from "Page Makeup by Postprocessing Text Formatter Output", Brian W. Kernighan and Christopher J. Van Wyck, Computing Systesms 2,2 (Spring 1989). ... elaborate macro packages have been written for troff ... a package by M.E. Lesk does vertical justification ... [It] is intricate and slow, and does not address the more complicated task of mixing single- and double-column text with figures of different widths, which is characteristic of technical conference proceedings and some scientific journals. The difficulty with macro packages for page makeup ... is that it is simply too hard to write page-makeup programs of the necessary complexity in the clumsy and incomplete macro languages provided by these formatters. -- =Spencer (spencer@eecs.umich.edu)
ian@sq.sq.com (Ian F. Darwin) (08/25/89)
Scott Plunkett (plunkett@prcrs.UUCP) writes: > When the following can be done as easily with a WYSIWYG then troff > may be retired: > > cat <<! | tbl | troff > ." version %I% > . > .TS > center, box; > c s s > c c c > l r l. > `pwd` > _ > Name Size Owner > _ > `ls -l | awk '{print $9 "\t" $5 "\t" $3}'` > .TE > ! The conditition could profitably be extended to read: "When the following can be encapsulated in a shell file and run on demand to produce the given report without any WYSIWYG fumbling, i.e., the whole operation of running the report, formatting and printing it can be accomplished merely by typing one line to the shell (or one menu click from X11), with *no* on-screen editing, no transformations and 'importing', in short, no manual intervention, then you may begin to think about retiring some of the automatic formatters currently in service." -- Ian Darwin SoftQuad Inc ian@sq.com uunet!sq!ian -- #exclude <stddisclaim.h>