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From: grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG = DIY (=hubris)
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Date: 12 Aug 89 04:21:51 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1438@hydra.gatech.EDU>
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In-reply-to: les@chinet.chi.il.us's message of 11 Aug 89 23:14:02 GMT


Well, I know at leats one very good reason I use TeX rather than,
e.g., Word or somesuch.

I run a lot of simulations. For the last chapter I just wrote, I
converted the output of my simulation into a `vc' (or `sc') format
file using a Gnuemacs elisp function [using emacs as a glorified awk].

I then wrote out the visicalc file to a text file. This formats my
data, rounding just like I want it. I then use another Emacs function
to insert the LaTeX formatting commands to make it into a table.  It
actually uses a custom LaTeX environment to do this, built using
\newenvironment. I changed this \newenvironment approximately 10 times
before I liked what I saw [ using texx2 ].

Using this, I converted and formatted 16 tables of data.  It took a
couple of hours, but much of that was spent deciding how I want things
to look. The next 16 will be easier & faster.

How easy is it to import data into tables for WYSIWYG editors?
Admittedly, this is ``just another feature'' and probably isn't all
that difficult to add, but the point is that I did all of this using
relatively old software. Unless the WYSIWYG system has a textual
intermediate representation, I think that this would be very difficult
to do.

Of course, a two-view system would be able to deal with it.