Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 17:24:10 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: "Pedro F. Giffuni" <pgiffuni@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co> Cc: Jean-Marc Zucconi <jmz@cabri.obs-besancon.fr>, jkh@time.cdrom.com, hasty@rah.star-gate.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is Thot (WYSIWIG editor) for you? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970514170338.311w-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <337A213E.6375@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co>
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On Wed, 14 May 1997, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote: > No, I'm not confusing them. I (perhaps we) would like a WYSIWYG editor > that enforces a standarized format and that we agree is a nice tool. *I* > don't like vi, emacs or those other editors, and I don't wnat to have to > learn SGML to write documentation. The problem is that structured documents and WYSIWYG are conceptually incompatible in enough ways that it is just really hard to make an editor that does both, and just about impossible to do both. The path that most *usable* structure editors take is providing the user with a list of possible tags that can be inserted where the cursor is, plus some interface for editing the attributes. The details of how this is implemented vary, but they all do basically the same thing. You can enhance things by applying some quasi-wysiwyg formatting to elements (eg headings in a larger font and appropriate spacing). Corel WordPerfect does this quite well in my opinion. Problems arise with when the structure of the document doesn't match how things are formatted. For example, if information is relocated, suppressed or altered in some way during the formatting process, WYSIWYG is problematic. SGML is pretty easy to learn--you have start tags, end tags, attributes and an occasional entity. The hard part is learning the particulars of a complex DTD like Docbook. Good SGML editors help you out with the latter. I like to think of them as What You See Is What You Need (WYSIWYN) editors. Unfortunately, outside of the excellent psgml mode for Emacs, the only good SGML aware editors are commercial and pretty expenive. -john
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