Subject: <None> From: phenning@herky.cs.uiowa.edu (Paul Henning) Date: 19 May 1993 16:20:35 +0600
Subject: Re: Let's write a wordprocessor.
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Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 19:02:19 GMT
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In article <1tchniINNgo6@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> msb@cats.ucsc.edu (Maurice S Barnum) writes:
>
>I think the perfect word processor would be a front end to tex,
>possibly with it's own macro package, maybe using latex. To be
>wysiwyg, it would make approximate line breaks, etc. as you go
>until enough information was entered for a full page, then it
>would format that.
One note of caution about having a front end to TeX. We have installed
a MS-Windows package (blech!) at our site which is allegedly a WYSIWYG
form of LaTeX. However, the software authors fail to explain any of the
underlying philosophy behind LaTeX (it's not a word processor, it's
typesetting, etc...), and so our LaTeX illiterate staff find it
extraordinarily frustrating to work with. And it turns out that you
have to drop into LaTeX to do some things anyway, AND it requires a real
ugly style sheet if you want to export the TeX file elsewhere.
Though I would love to see something [La]TeX based, I think that [La]TeX
is best left as is, rather than trying to make it pretty. An X-based
package that supports the word processing idiom would be a great way
for people to make good (not great) documents without the learning curve
of other approaches...
Paul Henning