Steve Litt wrote:
On Wednesday 26 March 2008 05:22, Eric S Fraga wrote:
At Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:33:22 -0700 (PDT),
Rich Shepard wrote:
On Fri, 21 Mar 2008, Andre Poenitz wrote:
WYSIWYG promise?
Andre',
I hope not!! That's why there's AbiWord and OO.o.
Exactly! I sure don't want wysiwyg which, in my view, is for people
who want a glorified typewriter. I want a typesetter that knows more
than I do about how to prepare documents that look good! And LaTeX or
LyX are perfect for that!
Oh oh, here it goes again :-)
In my opinion, LyX *is* WYSIWYG to a significant degree. LyX content in LyX
looks very much like its PDF output. Typefaces, sizes, weights, slants,
margins all look similar to the eventual output.
Sure. LyX tries to be wysiwyg when that is easy to do. Wysiwyg is
ok as long as it doesn't limit output quality. But sometimes the real-time
constraints of editing collide with time-consuming layout algorithms.
This is where other word processors gives up on layout to satisfy
the real-time constraints, while LyX choose to give up on wysiwyg instead,
in order to be both fast and produce nice final output.
The most striking examples of not being wysiwyg
are line and page breaking.
The line breaking is greatly simplified compared to what latex do.
This gives lyx more speed than other word processors, and
it also gives latex better quality than any word processor.
There is no attempt at page breaking in LyX at all. It'd be hopeless
to have it match latex, and it'd be useless if it didn't.
This is usually ok, but sometimes confusing for people who want
to know how many pages they have. Or when you notice
a typo in the middle of the third line on page 17 of your printout.
Okay, so you can't just go to page 17, you go to the nearest section
heading and count paragraphs. And then they typo isn't in the
middle of some line, but near an edge instead.
Placing and sizing figures is another not so wysiwyg case.
For something that really, truly isn't WYSIWYG, look at old WordPerfect 5.1.
Everything's one size monofont in WordPerfect 5.1, but the printed page has
typefaces, slants, weights, sizes and the like. WordPerfect 5.1 didn't even
show graphics -- it just had a 1 character white block to represent the
graphic. Now THAT was non-WYSIWYG.
I've never understood the "WYSIWYM" and "we are not WYSIWYG" marketing of LyX.
Why can't just say things like the following:
* Our output looks much better
* Our output follows true typographic convention by default
* Our page numbers are always accurate
* Our two column stuff comes out right
* Our chapters begin on the correct page
* Our figures are placed in pleasing places by default
* Our program is much more stable than most word processors
* Our native format is easy to parse text
* Our user interface is fast for the touch typist
I think the "we're not WYSIWYG" and "WYSIWYM" slogans are confusing to
prospective and new LyX users, and really don't make much sense.
We can say all that - and keep "wysiwym" too. :-) Nice list.
Helge Hafting
