From: mjr@ursa.calvin.edu (Matt Ranney) Subject: Re: Let's write a wordprocessor. Date: Sat, 22 May 1993 15:56:43 GMT
dlj0@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu (DAVID L. JOHNSON) writes:
>>I'd very much advise using LaTeX, to get the logical structure
>>of documents into it (something that most wysiwig word processors
>>are notoriously bad at).
This is something I hadn't really considered, and is a good point.
Often I get slowed down in a WYSIWYG environment because I concentrate
on what the text looks like right now instead of what it will look
like after I'm done writing it. I guess you just have to forget about
the format, get all the text out there, and then go about making it
look nice. It's just so tempting to tweak with all the values when
they are right there though.
[...]
>The report from AT&T that was in this thread earlier has a definite point.
>Once you get used to it, writing in TeX on an editor is *much* faster and
>less of a headache than editing formatted text. My wife spent half an hour
>last night worrying about a subheading in Wordperfect that wanted to jump up
>a line on the screen. If she weren't using a word processor, but was in an
>editor writing TeX, that wouldn't have been a problem. But, there is that
>bridge to cross. This word processor idea is exactly on target for that.
As cool as TeX is, I've had more than my share of headaches with it.
Many times when I've desperately wanted a document to be changed in a
certain way that wasn't something I do with TeX very often, I had to
change something, run TeX, run xdvi, look at it, go back to the
editor, change it, run TeX, etc. Then, when I gave up trying to
remember how to do it, I'd haul out the TeXbook, *IF* I had it with
me, or someone else there had one.
No, I think that if your wife wouldn't have had to worry about that
particular situation, she would have had to worry about a whole host
of others. At least WordPerfect could tell her right away that it was
doing something she didn't want. She would have had to worry about
annoying formatting things no matter where she made her document.
Arguably, the writing process and the formatting process should be
seperate tasks. I'll have to think about this when designing our WP
program.
>Please, though, don't create ANOTHER TeX macro package for it. Files have
>to be portable, and most sites won't bother with such a special-purpose
>macro package. I used to use a DOS word-processor, EXP, for technical
>writing. It has a converter to TeX, but uses its own macro package. That
>make the output essentially useless if you don't have their macro on the
>system you're using.
I definately wouldn't do this. If it ouput TeX/LaTeX, then it should
be complete TeX/LaTeX.