[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1702 bytes --]

On 6/2/24 7:39 AM, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>
> Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised 
> when WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, 
> but we weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's 
> potential for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus 
> fostering portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man 
> pages on terminals and in book form or  technical papers as TMs and as 
> journal articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. 
> (Microsoft Word clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
>
Yup, that's what I was really meaning to ask and what I was hoping to 
hear about.

> Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept 
> documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for 
> unanticipated purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca 
> Cardelli and Mark Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished 
> their dream of Blue, a WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't 
> know yet whether that blue-sky goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen 
> as a ponderous latter-day attempt. Does anyone know whether it has 
> fostered tool use?)
>
Interesting, I was wishing for something along those lines after using 
TeX Studio for a while. A quick preview side by side is nice, but 
wouldn't it be great to be able to work on the preview side of the pane 
while the markup side changes (as minimally as possible) showing your 
changes as you make them and being able to switch back and forth? 
Personally, I prefer troff to tex, but just idea of markup and WYSIWYG 
is enticing.

Will

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2947 bytes --]