🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
   Then you've never seen an illuminated manuscript.  Remind me NEVER to
   take a course from you!  Of course, this type of wrapping is trivial.
   The other type of wrapping (they kind that appears in our local
   newspaper "Features" section almost every day of the year) is more
   sophisticated.
----

I think that a fundemental problem is the documents people are intending to
write. Few scientific papers look good with wrapped text, illuiminations,
etc. Few editions of Time/Newsweek/etc look good without them.

Perhaps different tools are needed? Lamport has a good point when he says
``latex lets you worry about content, not form'' -- Time and Newsweek
and your local paper often worry more about form than content.

--
   "If it's not done by troff, it must be unimportant"
   "Troff (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should
   all exchange troff documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)"
--
"PostScript (like OS/360) is a standard, hence it is good, and we should
all exchange PostScript documents (yeah, like we should all buy IBM 360's!)"

It's easy to words in peoples mouths.

---
   I said troff math output looks better than MS-Word.  I haven't looked
   at the output from any Mac equation editors, but they may well rival TeX
   (which is superior to troff).  Having written math in BOTH troff and
   MS-Word, I find troff math is extremely hard to write, and very tricky
   to debug (like it took me over an hour to get a full-page equation
   with several cases to work).  On a PC, you could *draw* the equation
   in about 5 minutes, despite its complicated nature.
---

Overall, your point is well taken. There are times when I've had to
beat LaTeX over the head to make it do exactly what I want to do.
Thats' why I've written TeX previewers - it reduces the cycletime of
making niggling little formatting changes. However, one need not throw
out the baby with the bathwater.

I think two-view (or multi-view) editing of documents is the right
approach.  At times, I want to view someting as straight text & use
Emacs to bash on it.  At other times, I'd like to see a structured
representation of the document to move it around on the display, or
e.g., force footnotes and their references to be on the same page.

If one wants to grouse about e.g., the problems of TeX, one should
grouse that it's a ``single input stream'' environment. The command
definitions should be in another file/area/marked thing, and text
should be text. This is difficult to do with, e.g. the handy little
macros we all write to avoid typing things, but it would make two-view
systems easier to deal with.

In this sense, The Publisher by ArborTeX is, in my mind, headed in a
good direction. They also have a table editor and equation editor.
The table editor I can understand; tables are visual things, and you
should be able to lay it out ``just so'' -- equations on the other
hand, I find faster to enter inline (which you can still do in The
Publisher).