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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/2/24 7:39 AM, Douglas McIlroy
wrote:<br>
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<div><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Perhaps the
question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when
WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we
weren't, but we weren't attracted to it either, because it
sacrificed markup's potential for expressing the logical
structure of documents and thus fostering portability of
text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on
terminals and in book form or technical papers as TMs and
as journal articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for
typesetting math. (Microsoft Word clumsily diverts to a
separate markup pane for math.) </font></div>
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Yup, that's what I was really meaning to ask and what I was hoping
to hear about.<br>
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<div><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Moreover, WYSIWYG
was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept
documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for
unanticipated purposes, In this regard, I still regret that
Luca Cardelli and Mark Manasse moved on from Bell Labs
before they finished their dream of Blue, a WYSIWYG editor
for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous
latter-day attempt. Does anyone know whether it has fostered
tool use?)</font></div>
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<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Interesting, I was wishing
for something along those lines after using TeX Studio for a
while. A quick preview side by side is nice, but wouldn't it be
great to be able to work on the preview side of the pane while the
markup side changes (as minimally as possible) showing your
changes as you make them and being able to switch back and forth?
Personally, I prefer troff to tex, but just idea of markup and
WYSIWYG is enticing.<br>
<br>
Will<br>
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