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-<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 (&#8220;What you see is what you get&#8221;) 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&#8217;t perceived as significant. However, that was a long
-time ago: why has nothing been done with the &#8220;wonder text processor&#8221;
-to make it fit with modern perceptions?
-<p/>There are two answers to this. First, the simple &#8220;things <em>have</em>
-been done&#8221; (but they&#8217;ve not taken over the TeX world); and second,
-&#8220;there are philosophical reasons why the way TeX has developed is
-ill-suited to the WYSIWYG style&#8221;.
-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&#8217;s output without actually running TeX.
-<p/>A celebrated early system offering &#8220;WYSIWYG using TeX&#8221; 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 &#8216;great&#8217; 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&#8217;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
-&#8220;<a href="FAQ-WYGexpts.html">TeX document preparation environment</a>&#8221;
-are in progress.
-<p/>Nevertheless, the TeX world has taken a long time to latch onto the
-idea of WYSIWYG.
-Apart from simple arrogance (&#8220;we&#8217;re better, and have no need to
-consider the petty doings of the commercial word processor market&#8221;),
-there is a real conceptual difference between the word processor model
-of the world and the model LaTeX and ConTeXt employ &#8212; the idea of
-&#8220;markup&#8221;. &#8220;Pure&#8221; 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&#8217;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>