Armstead_Phil_Smith@cup.portal.com (09/22/88)
I admit, this is a flame which may not belong here, but the moderator has not seen fit to enter it in the appropriate newsgroup : The administrator of comp.text_desktop may have noticed that this newsgroup has next to nothing to say. I believe that this is in large part due to the inept decision to exclude anything useful from the forum. It is absurd to only consider DTP WYSIWYG ! There is a serious industry problem related to the lack of appropriate formats and transfer mechanisms of documents of all types -- graphic, text, typeset, etc. Who cares whether or not the documents were prepared interactively, or with macros, etc. ? The internal representation is what's important. Once that is standardized, WYSIWYG is trivial. Serious DTP recognize that the lack of a base representation means that everyone must either ignore the rest of the world, or produce filters and translators to everyone elses format. As for comparisons, it is entirely appropriate to compare things like PageMaker, Ventura, Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker, Interleaf, Arbortext Publisher, TeX, troff, nroff, psroff, runoff, DisplayPostscript ... the list goes on and on. Knowing what the users want includes understanding what tools are used, and the degree of interoperability they have. WYSIWYG is no better than the foundation upon which it is built. Most DTP vendors are realizing that using them to make newsletters or one-sheet graphics layouts is far too narrow a use of the products. Creating documents involves thinking ahead about templates/stylesheets, and being able to do things like automatically create tables of contents. Things that users of Unix documenters tools like troff/pic/eqn/tbl can do easily can be as or more difficult in most WYSIWYG tools. Clearly, some things are better done with macros than others. If a sufficiently layered set of products can hide the macro definitions and use, tools which specialize in creating one form of document can fit hand-in-glove with another. Internal representations, file formats, etc., are all real issues that involves looking at real existing products. Interleaf is available on PCs, PageMaker on Macs, etc. It is silly to discriminate against machine classes in this day in age. I would like to see serious discussion of these subjects. This means competent and responsible administration of the newsgroup.
mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (09/24/88)
>I admit, this is a flame which may not belong here, but the moderator >has not seen fit to enter it in the appropriate newsgroup : >The administrator of comp.text_desktop may have noticed that this >newsgroup has next to nothing to say. I believe that this is in large >...........deleted Comp.text does seem to be the place to discuss connections between document-composition systems.