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diff --git a/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-notWYSIWYG.html b/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-notWYSIWYG.html deleted file mode 100644 index 13b331a0481..00000000000 --- a/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-notWYSIWYG.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,62 +0,0 @@ -<head> -<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label notWYSIWYG</title> -</head><body> -<h3>Why is TeX not a WYSIWYG system?</h3> -<p/>WYSIWYG is a marketing term (“What you see is what you get”) for -a particular style of text processor. WYSIWYG systems are -characterised by two principal claims: that you type what you want to -print, and that what you see on the screen as you type is a close -approximation to how your text will finally be printed. -<p/>The simple answer to the question is, of course, that TeX was -conceived long before the marketing term, at a time when the marketing -imperative wasn’t perceived as significant. However, that was a long -time ago: why has nothing been done with the “wonder text processor” -to make it fit with modern perceptions? -<p/>There are two answers to this. First, the simple “things <em>have</em> -been done” (but they’ve not taken over the TeX world); and second, -“there are philosophical reasons why the way TeX has developed is -ill-suited to the WYSIWYG style”. -Indeed, there is a fundamental problem with applying WYSIWYG techniques -to TeX: the complexity of TeX makes it hard to get the -equivalent of TeX’s output without actually running TeX. -<p/>A celebrated early system offering “WYSIWYG using TeX” came from the -VorTeX project: a pair of (early) Sun workstations worked in -tandem, one handling the user interface while the other beavered away -in the background typesetting the result. VorTeX was quite -impressive for its time, but the two workstations combined had hugely less -power than the average sub-thousand dollar Personal Computer -nowadays, and its code has not proved portable (it never even made the -last ‘great’ TeX version change, at the turn of the 1990s, to -TeX version 3). Modern systems that are similar in -their approach are Lightning Textures (an extension of -Blue Sky’s original TeX system for the Macintosh), and Scientific -Word (which can also cooperate with a computer algebra system); both -these systems are <a href="FAQ-commercial.html">commercially available</a>. -<p/>The issue has of recent years started to attract attention from TeX -developers, and several interesting projects addressing the -“<a href="FAQ-WYGexpts.html">TeX document preparation environment</a>” -are in progress. -<p/>Nevertheless, the TeX world has taken a long time to latch onto the -idea of WYSIWYG. -Apart from simple arrogance (“we’re better, and have no need to -consider the petty doings of the commercial word processor market”), -there is a real conceptual difference between the word processor model -of the world and the model LaTeX and ConTeXt employ — the idea of -“markup”. “Pure” markup expresses a logical model of a document, -where every object within the document is labelled according to what -it is rather than how it should appear: appearance is deduced from the -properties of the type of object. Properly applied, markup can -provide valuable assistance when it comes to re-use of documents. -<p/>Established WYSIWYG systems find the expression of this sort of -structured markup difficult; however, markup <em>is</em> starting to -appear in the lists of the commercial world’s requirements, for two -reasons. First, an element of markup helps impose style on a -document, and commercial users are increasingly obsessed with -uniformity of style; and second, the increasingly pervasive use of -XML-derived document archival formats demands it. The same -challenges must needs be addressed by TeX-based document -preparation support schemes, so we are -observing a degree of confluence of the needs of the two communities: -interesting times may be ahead of us. -<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=notWYSIWYG">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=notWYSIWYG</a> -</body> |