Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!microsoft!t-rayc
From: t-rayc@microsoft.UUCP (Raymond Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG = DIY (=hubris)
Message-ID: <7338@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 11 Aug 89 18:44:08 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <14903@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <387@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl> <1438@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Reply-To: t-rayc@microsoft.UUCP (Raymond Chen)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 30

In article <1438@hydra.gatech.EDU> rh26@prism.gatech.EDU (Howard,Robert L) writes:
>>Question: can someone tell me that with a wysiwig it is just
>>as easy to make a global design change?
>
>Yes, it is....if the person is smart enough to use styles (or style
>sheets) in his document.

The problem is that most people aren't smart enough to use styles.
Having worked in a university computer help center, I've seen some
amazingly ... "nonportable document conventions"... Since the system was
WYSIWYG, they figured that if it looked good on the screen (and on
the page), then their job was done.  Nevermind that they did such
amazingly inflexible things like using spaces to align tables or center
headings, inserting hard returns to force page breaks, even manually
typing the page number at the bottom of each page.  Imagine my grief
when they come in asking "I'd like to use font X instead of the
font Y I've been using so far.  But when I change the font, the formatting
goes really screwy."

The problem isn't whether WYSIWYG is "better" than batch processing.
The problem is that WYSIWYG makes ignorance acceptable.  (Followups
to sci.edu regarding the hip-ness of admitting that "Oh, I don't know 
anything about science/math/computers.") 

The capabilities of each are (to the extent that most people need) equivalent.
[Still, there are some things in TeX I have yet to see in a WYSIWYG
system.  Most of them involve carefully-calculated penalty and glue
settings to achieve a desired effect in a robust manner.]
--
Raymond Chen, mathematician by training		...!microsoft!t-rayc