🚀 go-pugleaf

There have a several postings recently on a WYSIWYG TeX.  I haven't seen
it, but for it and any similar program, users should be aware that any
manuscript it produces will probably  *not* be usable by the growing
number of journals that are accepting TeX submissions.  The reason for
this is that such a program is likely to insert fixed spacing, even
fixed page breaks and all those other physical, rather than logical
formatting items that any journal will have to change.  There was one
I heard about that apparently displayed formulas by inserting a string
\\ \ \ \ \ \ ...
to cause a linebreak followed by a certain number of hard spaces!  I am
sure the program in question does better than that, but the problems
involved in doing it right are enormous.  In fact, Cay Horstmann had
an excellent discussion of the problems in a recent Tugboat (he is
the author of ChiWriter, so he should know).  One of the points he
mentioned was that his users were *not* prepared to use a math shift
so he had to resort to heuristics to guess what was and what wasn't
mathematics and there were certain things that were essentially
unguessable (is an isolated `a' or `I' a math symbol or a word?)
My personal opinion is that true WYSIWYG is inconsistent with TeX, but
if all you want is to be able to have an alpha appear in your ms
instead of \alpha or asscripts appear raised or lowered, then that
should be possible.  But actual line and page breaks are neither
possible nor especially desirable.  Of course, real time previewing is
another matter.  I think that is both possible and highly desirable.

Michael Barr