From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: Formatting Editors Article-I.D.: ucb.1489 Posted: Mon Jul 12 00:14:40 1982 Received: Tue Jul 13 05:15:08 1982 Reply-To: ople >From LAWS@SRI-AI Mon Jul 12 00:12:28 1982 I used XED for a short time, and was not particularly happy with its use of invisible formatting commands. (I suspect that the problem was in my lack of adaptation to the system.) I think such an editor requires more than a 22-line ASCII display. If the display can't give me "what you see is what you get", or if the document is to be formatted differently on different output devices, I occasionally want to be able to see and edit the formatting commands along with the text. This implies that * The formatting commands should be in ASCII, at least during the editing process. * The commands should be symbolic macros (as in SCRIBE) rather than low-level phototypesetter commands (as in TROFF). The macro expansion can then be made device-dependent. * The commands should be in-line rather than breaking text so that the command flag character is on column 1. In-line commands (e.g., @italics(foobar)) are much easier to read and to imagine in the formatted form. * The formatting commands must themselves form a coherent system. In short, the editor should be fully integrated with a symbolic formatting system such as SCRIBE or TEX. There should be a simple mapping between commands entered with a keystroke or lightpen and those entered as ASCII text. -- Ken Laws -------