🚀 go-pugleaf

> Our intent is to replace preview with code which hopefully will work in
> the same process as the document being edited.  Ideally I would like to
> see the Postscript printing layout technology leveraged into a true
> WYSIWYG editor. 

A drawback with WYSIWYG editors as you describe is that they require a
binary format in which to store working drafts and editable document
copies.  One can rest assured that there will never exist a
WYSIWYG-to-ATK interpreter.

I think one of the celebrated features that ATK offers over many (if not
all) commercially available counterparts is that its intermediate data
format is non-proprietary and ASCII readable. This open systems
approach, to coin increasingly popular buzz term, makes text formatting
packages like ATK far more attractive, in my opinion, than similar
look-alikes (like Rapport and Asterix, for examples) which have limited
usefulness outside of their own proprietary formatting protocols.

If I really wanted to use a WYSIWYG editor, I'd probably opt for
something with a full range of formatting and typesetting capabilities,
which in all likelihood would lie outside of what ATK could reasonably
offer, and beyond what ATK has thus far been exemplary in providing.

ATK's strengths lie in its simplicity, its ease of use, and in its
relative ease of portability among a variety of communications systems,
including on-line and printable help facilities, mail and bulletin board
services, text processing utilities, etc. 

I think it would behoove project goals to investigate new text
formatting ideas from the perspective of keeping data formats flexible,
and as standard and as portable as possible.

-Bob