From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: WYSIWYG editor-formatters Article-I.D.: ucb.1490 Posted: Mon Jul 12 00:34:52 1982 Received: Tue Jul 13 05:16:12 1982 >From npois!npoiv!harpo!eagle!rdb!jes@Berkeley Mon Jul 12 00:32:46 1982 I have never used a commercial word processor, but I have seen an editor-formatter that tried. It had a command to embolden a piece of text which then showed the text emboldened on the screen (inverse video, as I recall). You could edit the emboldened text using the normal commands, but if you wanted to put it back into regular font, you had to delete it and re-enter it. The point is, as formatting gets more complex, there gets to be a lot of information in the format, and it is sometimes necessary to edit that information. An editor which accepts formatting commands and acts on them, rather than simply displaying them as in the nroff or Scribe paradigm, should provide a means of editing the format information. I can't imagine a pure WYSIWYG editor-formatter being able to match the facilities provided by tbl, eqn, and Scribe. The only compromise that I can think of is to provide a WYSIWYG mode (oh, horrors) and a mode in which the formatting information is visible and editable. -- Jon Shopiro