William R. Buckley wrote:
On this note, add my pipe.
If the speed with which LaTeX could operate were such
that output could be produced and displayed within the
timeframe of a human keystroke (for fun, lets say you're
a really good 150 wpm typist), how would this differ from
WYSIWYG?
Then it would not differ from wysiwyg, and
texmacs tries to do something like that.
The problems are:
1. No machine is fast enough for this, or will ever be.
2. It'd be unpleasant anyway.
It'd be unpleasant because even one character added or removed
will sometimes trigger big changes. A difference of one letter
will often enough alter the line breaking of the entire paragraph.
When you edit the middle of some large paragraph, do you want
text in the whole paragraph jumping around, as all of it rebreaks
completely with new hyphenation points several times per sentence?
The cursor itself will move back and forth too, and possibly shift
to a different line or page.
Occationally, the different line breaking will also affect the
page breaking and the positions of all floats. Typing into
a real fast latex processor would be a jumpy and sometimes
confusing experience.
As for no machine being fast enough - rebreaking of
several pages and moving floats takes time, usually
more time than you want between keystrokes. It'll make a fast
pc seem sluggish. And this is "normal stuff".
Now, latex happens to be a programming language
capable of doing any computation.
This means that stuff complicated enough to slow down any
computer is possible. I would not recommend to try, but it is
at least possible to have latex itself render a raytraced image. I don't
expect anyone to do that, but machines getting faster means that
people add more demanding latex packages too.
LyX is not WYSIWYG, unless your display side is
tantamount to a LaTeX processor, and if that is the case,
why not just save the produced image, instead of running
LaTeX again to produce a file?
LyX/LaTeX are not WYSIWYM because it makes decisions
about where I want text and graphics to be. Well, let me
put this claim under suspension, while I test the various
alternative *frame* mechanisms that have been suggested
by others.
I think the product is both, and yet lacking in some very
interesting ways, this view subject to my lack of detailed
knowledge of La/TeX. What I find missing is knobs. I
guess I have to get used to working without knobs. Ventura
Publisher has lots of knobs to its user interface, really
powerful knobs.
LyX can embed latex commands directly. This gives
you all the power you can dream of - although not with
a pretty user interface.
Helge Hafting
