Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG = DIY (=hubris)
Message-ID: <9245@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 11 Aug 89 23:14:02 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1438@hydra.gatech.EDU> <19001@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 19

In article <19001@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:

>>Why not enjoy seeing a reasonable facsimile of your document right
>>on the screen?

>Mostly because, at the moment, that is not possible.  A reasonable
>facsimile of the document would require a 2000x3000 pixel screen.

"Reasonable" is a relative term.  Many times all you need is the
text, possibly with some modified attributes for fonts etc., but
you want to see the layout with the line and page breaks as you
go, or keep parallel columns together.  For example, I find it
difficult to compose something like a script or quoted text with
a comments in parallel paragraphs without seeing the context. Several
of the semi-wysiwyg wordprocessors handle this "reasonably" well. That
is, they calculate the character sizes on the fly but display the normal
screen fonts expanding the scale if needed to approximate the layout.

Les Mikesell