On Mon, 2011-12-12 at 03:00 +1030, Tim wrote: > On Sat, 2011-12-10 at 23:39 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > > WYSIWYG forces you to make decisions at every turn about what the > > final result looks like. Markup systems such as LaTeX or the SGML > > variants, espcially with good editor support, let you describe what > > you're writing (this is a Chapter title, this is a Figure legend, this > > is a 3-column table where one of the entries is a 5-column > > subtable, ...) and they take care of the rest. Sure, you can use style > > sheets with a WYSIWYG system, but it requires iron self-discipline not > > to be constantly fiddling with spacing or margins when you should be > > concentrating on content. > > I can't say that I agree with that. Once I found a word processor that > did allow decent use of style, OpenOffice.org, I found it dead easy to > use it properly (type a line, call it a heading, bash out paragraph > after paragraph, occasionally highlight special words and call them > special things (or emphasised words, not just italicised words), edit my > styles so special things looked different, edit my styles so that > headings did what I wanted them to, et cetera, rarely ever having to > play hodge-podge with highlight bits on a page, play with toolbar > styling options, then go and highlight the next bit on the page...). > > On the other hand, watching people horse around with MS Office, that's > all they ever did. Use it like a crappy 1980s electric typewriter with > a bulleted list generator. And then do masses of re-editing throughout > the document as they changed one thing in the middle, and all their > hand-fiddled pagination went out of whack. And had to select entire > document, to change fonts, then go back and hand edit the document, bit > by bit, for the special parts. *It* really does make it hard to style a > document properly, it's UI sucks. > > Properly styling a document, rather than playing hodge-podge as you go > along, makes it very easy to export documents into other formats, when > you have to. e.g. They logically transfer into HTML (with headings and > paragraphs), rather than illogically become random blocks of text with > random mark-up here, there, and everywhere. I don't fundamentally disagree. It's just that with a tool such as LaTeX you don't have the constant temptation of fiddling with the output. For one thing you can't actually see the result until you process the document, and for another it's not terribly easy to mess with the tool's formatting decisions. For those with enough experience and self-discipline, the WYSIWYG tools can produce good results, but for others it's not so clear. There's a popular misconception that WYSIWYG tools are easier to use. They aren't. They're easier to *learn* as long as what you want is easy to represent visually. However, I digress. poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
