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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!cs.mu.OZ.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!serv.hinet.net!news-peer.nctu.edu.tw!news.nctu.edu.tw!spring.edu.tw!news.uoregon.edu!ddsw1!news.mcs.net!ddsw1!not-for-mail From: les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy Subject: Re: Betting on Unix Date: 14 Mar 1997 12:25:51 -0600 Organization: /usr/lib/news/organi[sz]ation Lines: 91 Message-ID: <5gc57f$hkq$1@Mars.mcs.net> References: <5d3sr2$44n@nntp1.best.com> <5g1grm$glu@web.nmti.com> <5g5ddm$qcf$1@venus.mcs.net> <5g9f7g$th@web.nmti.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: mars.mcs.net Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:164574 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6333 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2806 comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy:56975 In article <5g9f7g$th@web.nmti.com>, Peter da Silva <peter@nmti.com> wrote: >> In what way does it look different, other than possible font mismatches if >> you display Truetype, print postscript or embed EPS with no preview bitmap? > >Because you're deferring all that until the last step. Well, it's your choice. If you do it with Word paragraph styles it doesn't matter much. >> There is a tradeoff between the way WP and Word do things. WP lets you >> see the codes, but in Word for the types of attributes that apply to >> paragraphs and other document parts only one attribute can be active. >> That means you can apply styles/codes without having to find the old >> codes and delete or change them. > >That's a user-interface problem... that is, WP doesn't examine the codes >you're applying and remove the conflicts. You don't understand the implication. WP don't *know* what styles can conflict with other styles for two reasons. First, it doesn't know what parts of a document the style is for - it doesn't know anything about document parts, it just processes the codes as it hits them. Second, you are free to edit the WP styles and modify them to include any codes or text, or replace them by loading a different definition. If it removed conflicting styles you wouldn't be able to pull in a different definition and use it in a situation where you wanted both to expand. The increased generality of this approach forces the interface to be more cumbersome. >Yes, WordPerfect is a GUI on top of a conventional text processor. It's >a much beter design, and if the GUI was as well integrated with the >underlying implementation it'd be a very nice tool indeed. But it can't be. The nature of 'process-embedded-codes-as-you-hit-them' prevents you from doing anything intelligent at the user interface like knowing about document parts. >Word can't do this sort of thing nearly as easily. I think you have to go into the macro language to do search/replace on codes to get the equivalent. The trade-off is that Word is much cleaner about what happens when you change paragraph styles since it knows that the old one no longer applies. If you get everything right on the first try, why bother with WYSIWG in the first place? I thought the whole point was that you could see your mistakes, try different things, make lots of changes to see the visual effects, etc. Embedded code systems become very ugly when you do that. >> WP 7 will generate HTML > >We've been using this feature. It's pretty damn horrible HTML... all graphical >markup rather than functional. It doesn't really save the document as HTML. >Rather, it treats HTML as a printer format and renders the document into it. > >> I guess that would make sense if there were a free WYSIWYG SGML editor. > >Assuming you value style over substance, yes. It only makes sense for a wordprocessor to treat it's final output as final output. You have the source in editable form already. HTML isn't really an exchange format. If you want substance, well there is always ascii text - I thought style was the point of everything else. >> Somehow I don't see selecting 'list bullet' from a style menu and having >> it happen on-screen as being all that indirect. > >The GUI hides the indirection, but it's still there. You're not selecting >"put a dot here" you're selecting "create a new list entry with the defined >attributes". Actually (in Word) I'm selecting a whole bunch of paragraph attributes at once and they apply just as directly as if I had set them individually. This is not the case in WP where I could go edit the style expansion into things other than paragraph attributes. >> Maybe someday they'll get it right and you >> won't have to trade handiness for versatility. > >I'm not holding my breath. I don't think it is impossible, it just has to be turned into a two-step process where the user interface is able to use codes that apply to document parts. Then at some point before rendering output you convert the working snapshot to embedded-code type processing. Les Mikesell les@mcs.com