From: swein@etsd.ml.com (Scott Weinstein) Subject: Re: A Word Processor for Linux Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 20:48:49 GMT
In article <PCG.93Aug5200805@decb.aber.ac.uk> pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
Dan> No offense, but did you ever stop and think that not everyone has
Dan> the same views. I hate TeX. It's a pain.
I hate it too, but because it ir poorly designed. The concept of
declarative (or even imperative) markup is just badly realized.
Dan> If I wanna change something, I wanna be able to move it on the
Dan> screen and see what it looks like.
This is the old 'What you see is all you get' argument, voiced by people
who never have to change their document formats, or worry about
formatting consistency. Try changing the font used for tables in *all*
tables of a document in most word processors. Sure, some have style
sheets, but style sheets are incredibly counterintuitive and hard to get
right in all the implementations I have seen.
Not to mention the fact that *no* popular wordprocessor I have ever seen
has regular expressions find/replace. How people can leave without that
I don't know.
Dan> I want to be able to read my document over before printing it, but
Dan> not have to skip over control codes.
The argument between document compilers (troff, scribe, TeX, lout, ...)
and page formatters (Word, Ami, Ventura, WordPefect) is ancient
religion, and ultimately boils down to whether you prefer to learn to
use a powerful and well structured tool, or you want to try to get away
with being excessively lazy now, and pay it later.
I don't think this is my idea, but couldn't a visually based editor
(WYSIWYG) have the capability to "compile" the document into tex, and
save use tex as its document format? This would give both sides what
they want. The power of tex, with the visual instant capabilites of a
word processor. Possibly it could be written as an add-on, to possibly
emacs?