Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having WYSIWYG in the article.

Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability to actually communicate with the computer, or describe things on an abstract level. People just poke their documents around until they get something reasonably sensible looking in their current editor.

Is the text reflowed around the figure or did the user just manually add a bunch of line breaks and then manually paste in the figure (anchored to what?). We’ll out later if somebody changes the font.

Maybe WYSIWIG almost works, actually. What you see is… whatever I got. Except it only works if we have the same version of the same office suite.

WYSIWIG was revolutionary in its time. Even the Alto didn't really use it, although you could turn it on if you were masochistic.

> describe things on an abstract level

That's exactly what ordinary users do NOT want.

WYSIWYG democratised computerised printing and other areas, arguably providing the backbone of the PC revolution.

You're mistaking Microsoft's specific implementation fumbles with an interaction mode that helps billions of people every day. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are plenty of good WYSIWYG implementations out there.

The only thing more frustrating than sizing and aligning a figure in MS Word is sizing and aligning a figure in LaTeX.

I agree, WYSIWYG is not a good idea, and a one button mouse is not a good idea.

You can have print preview if you want to preview the page layout. This is also faster and more efficient than reflowing the text as it is being typed, anyways.

(I don't know why the spelling is different)

Fascinating.. you are aware of the context of how WYSIWYG came about?

So presumably you don't want to return to that state, where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?

Can you explain a little bit further what your ideal paradigm is?

> where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?

That is why print preview is a good idea (which is possible with most modern computers; this can be done independently of WYSIWYG editing). For example, if you write a TeX file and then make the DVI file and use xdvi or another previewer to display it on the computer before you print it on paper.

Reveal Codes would be another possibility, perhaps in combination with a "partial WYSIWYG" editor which does not display reflowing etc in the editor and only in the preview; if you use Reveal Codes then formatting codes are displayed (e.g. bold, italics, etc), but you can also display the bold, italics, etc directly during editing. This can be a in between way, which gives you some of the benefits of WYSIWYG and some of the benefits of non-WYSIWYG.

while writing documentation in Markdown, I almost always have the preview open in split-screen in vscode, not because I need it, but mostly to make sure that the other people reading my work have a good experience.

Ideally people would write mark-up in text editors. If you want to be very nice, I guess it would be OK to have drag-and-drop WYSWYG environments that spit out the markup code, but there should be a very high priority on making sure the code produced is human-readable.

Mark-up is something that ordinary users will never understand. "Good enough" is what they want. Printing it to check that it came out right is just fine with them. It is simply not worth it for the software to try to make everything perfect.

Case in point: my book was edited in Vellum, and it can generate PDF and EPUB. The PDF had a widow (one line at the top of the last page of the chapter), and Vellum just omitted that one-line page. To the reader it seemed like a typo (which it was, in a sense).

I "fixed" it by removing a few words up above it, so everything fit on the last full page. But it was only that I knew about widow/orphan control that I could figure that out. Just imagine how much trouble it would be to make things perfectly WYSIWYG on every printer and every type of document.

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