dberry@lanai.CS.UCLA.EDU (07/02/88)
This concerns batch vs wysiwyg formatters. One of the so-called advantages of a batch system such as the UNIX troff is that it is easy to build pre- and post-processors which deal with special purpose text needs, e.g., bibliographical citations, equations, tables, pictures, graphs, indexing, tri-directional printing, etc. If the language of the basic formatter is powerful enough, each of these can be done as an independent program which can be used in a pipe with the basic formatter. Each such independent program can deal with its own special input and the writer of it can focus on designing it right with a good user interface and all the parenthoods. Moreover, it is very easy to add new capabilities as new independent programs, to wit as has been done with grap, indx, and tri-roff recently. In wysiwyg systems, it would seem that the formatter would tend to be more monolithic in that all such other processing would have to be done within the single program. Adding a new capability would seem to require opening up the base formatter and adding the capabilities to it. This could very well be rather messy to do. Please correct me if I am wrong about wysiwyg systems. My question is: Is there a wysiwyg formatting system that has been designed specifically to be extensible in this manner. Has there been any work on structuring wysiwyg formatters to be extensible in this manner? Please reply directly to me. I will summarize replies to the net. Prof. Daniel M. Berry, Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa 32000 ISRAEL Tel:+972-4-294325, Bitnet:DBERRY@TECHSEL Csnet & Internet:dberry@sel.technion.ac.il DASnet:[DDB1DM]dberry, MCIMail:277-9346 <dberry> Prof. Daniel M. Berry, Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa 32000 ISRAEL Tel:+972-4-294325 Bitnet:DBERRY@TECHSEL, Csnet & Internet:dberry@sel.technion.ac.il DASnet:[DDB1DM]dberry, MCIMail:277-9346 <dberry>
grogers@m.cs.uiuc.edu (07/03/88)
The Andrew Toolkit for X windows provides just what you want. The toolkit provides the mechanisms for object oriented programming style within the C language. This is done through a preprocessor to C; similar to C++. There is also a runtime library that performs dynamic loading and linking of new object classes. With the toolkit comes a set of classes for formated text, tables, pictures, equations, frame animated drawings, and some other miscellaneous stuff. There is an interobject protocol defined that allows objects to contain other objects. Thus, a text object may contain a table which might in turn contain some equations. Now because of the runtime loading and linking, anyone can create new classes and that work with the existing classes and applications. An editor comes with the toolkit that provides interactive access to any object class that can be dynamically loaded. Through the object class viewers, this editor provides What-You-See-Looks-Real-Neat editing. Of course you don't really want wysiwyg becuase then you could not "see" animations within your documents or have hypertext (just how would you print the hypertext graph?) The best part: all this is free from CMU and is included as part of the normal X distribution. The worst part: this software is fairly new and needs some polishing. Greg Rogers grogers@cs.uiuc.edu