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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 new file mode 100644 index 00000000000..09247c59096 --- /dev/null +++ b/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-notWYSIWYG.html @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +<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> |