🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian Reid, decwrl!glacier!reid, writes:
> In article <731@othervax.UUCP> ray@othervax.UUCP (Raymond D. Dunn) writes:
> >Tex, and the current UNIX tools for typeset text preparation, are
> >rapidly becoming dinosaurs - they probably have already become so....

> BALONEY. There is a place in the world for WYSIWYG systems that do not use
> embedded commands, but there is a large class of documents that 
> cannot be done at all well with the kind of interactive system that you are
> talking about. Anything where the structure is as important as the content....
> 
> Whether or not interactive systems will EVER be ok for this kind of material
> is an open research topic. My own belief is that it is possible...

1] reid's comments are good. Although I get good use from my Mac, and Interleaf
is fine, I still find Scribe, TeX, or troff+friends unavoidable for
some classes of documents.  Considering the number of people who have
access to both classes of support, and how many still burn billions of
CPU cycles running the latter, others must share this opinion.

Certainly, at least in the late 70s inside Bell Labs, it was almost
impossible to "sell" easier-to-use, but more restricted facilities over
harder-to-learn, but more powerful ones.  For example, that's how the
-MM macros got to be huge: we wanted to snuff out most of the (slightly
different) macro packages that were springing up and causing total chaos,
and had to preserve as much flexibility as possible, even at the
expense of adding hordes of options and consuming CPU cycles.  [This does
not imply that a Bell Labs is necessarily a "typical" environment [it isn't],
but that there exists a sizable audience for very powerful facilities.]

2] In one sense the "dinosaur" comment is sadly true.  After all, the
fundamental ideas of nroff/troff derive from 20-year-old runoff;
the troff/tbl/eqn/(-ms or -mm) group was all there by late 1976.
[Much useful work has been done since, on portability, device-independence,
new filters like pic & ideal, etc.  Nevertheless, most of what most people
use still matches what was there 9-10 years ago].  As I recall, Scribe
and TeX appeared in 1978 [reid, correct me please!]  We've certainly
made engineering progress in the use and support of these things; what's
not clear is how much fundamental progress we've made.

3] I too believe that it is possible to build interactive systems that
don't throw away the power of the most powerful current formatters.
I sure hope so: it would be pleasant to have something that would
totally replace troff+friends (or equivalent) earlier than 10 years
from now.  Maybe reid would give some pointers to a
few of the most interesting current research efforts
[i.e., that combine good features of WYSIWYG and markup languages.]?
I've generally thought that the text-processing system I've always
wanted on my desk needed
a) WYSIWYG editing + the best of structural description.  The latter should
be able to do about as well as Scribe or troff -MM, else no go.
b) Integrated graphics, images
c) interactive eqn, and especially tbl equivalent.
d) Multiple concurent views that let me edit at least the formatted
(WYSIWYG) view or the markup-language view [I'd like Hypertext-like features,
and holphrastic displays on document structure, and a bunch of others,
but no need to get greedy.]
e) Integrated spelling checker, Writer's Workbench, etc.
f) Desktop workstation with 8-10X VAX-780 integer performance, 8-32MB memory,
[my guess at what it takes to do a)-f) with reasonable programming.]

Now, e) exists commercially, b) is there now and/or coming soon;
examples of d) have been around, more-or-less. I haven't yet seen a
good version of c).  f) is clearly here within 2-3 years.
That really leaves a), so I hope people are working hard on the problem!
I WANT one of these things, so I hope there are some running in the
lab now, so that the software might be there when the hardware is.
-- 
-john mashey
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