From: cash@convex.com (Peter Cash)
Subject: Re: Troff vs FrameMaker Productivity
Organization: The Instrumentality
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 15:52:43 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by a user at CONVEX Computer
              Corp. The opinions expressed are those of the user and
              not necessarily those of CONVEX.

In article <1992Jul23.155833.4445@informix.com> robertw@informix.com (Robert Weinberg) writes:
>In article <1992Jul23.045118.27744@news.eng.convex.com> cash@convex.com (Peter  
>Cash) writes:
...
|| Why does WYSIWYG have to add _any_ complexity? You can give a writer (one
|| who doesn't care to mess with formatting decisions) a FrameMaker template.
|| If the template is well-designed, all the writer has to do is fill in the
|| blanks. It's as simple as typing text.

>I have yet to see a writer new to Frame who could refrain from creating
>his/her own formats! Though maybe the same could be said for troff'ers - I
>haven't lived among them, so I don't know.

There's certainly some truth in this--if you can see what the layout and
typography looks like, and can control it, it's difficult not to fiddle
with it. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I think that the disinclination
to let writers have control over the appearance of the document is a
left-over from an older way of working. Back when writers wrote on
typewriters, you had to leave formatting--and graphics--to others. So you
had writers writing text, which was handed over to the data entry people
who entered it into the system used by the typesetter. The typesetters then
composed it according to templates designed by layout artists, included
pictures drawn by the graphics artist, etc. etc. Now the writers can do
much of this work themselves. 

The visual appearance of the work is an essential part of its
effectiveness--why shouldn't the writer think about this, as well as about
the words that go into it? Saying that this process should be hidden from
the writer is sort of like saying that writers are dumb draft animals who
should be made to wear blinders so they're not distracted from the narrow
parameters of their true task.

>I started publishing on GUIs - on the Mac - so you are preaching to the
>choir here. But I have seen people whose life began on a keyboard, and who
>never even "get" the relationship between a mouse and the cursor on the
>screen - or who can't understand why they have to go to the third layer of
>menus to do what they used to do with a command-key on their WYSE. For
>these people, a GUI can be a nightmare of complexity and seemingly
>uselessly pretty features.

Well, I started with a markup language system that ran on a PDP-11, and
I've used Wordstar, TROFF, Microsoft Word on an MSDOS PC and on a Mac, Page
Maker on a Mac, and now Frame running in an X Windows environment, and
others I can't even remember. The only one I've ever really REALLY hated
was TROFF. 

>And face it, there have been and still are some crude WYSIWYG interfaces
>out there. Frame (along with MS WORD, for that matter) is exceptional in
>having keyboard shortcuts for most functions (though there are still lots
>of things that require mousing through several menus). Lots of people
>_resent_ having to lose their hand position on the keyboard to pick up a
>mouse whose functions they would prefer to perform via the keyboard.

That's a minor matter, and isn't really central to the markup-language vs.
WYSIG dispute. (I agree that keeping your hands on the keyboard as much as
possible is better than having to constantly shift back and forth between
the keyboard and the mouse. That's why I appreciate the fact that emacs
cursor control commands work with FrameMaker.) However, I think that the
dispute has been pretty clearly resolved in favor of the WYSIWIG
interfaces. WYSIWIG is simply a much better way to work, and it's a way of
working that makes sense to _everybody_, not just computer people. 

In my opinion, the major drawback of WYSIWIG software today is the lack of
portability--it's simply too hard to get text from one system to another. I
mean not only is it too hard to send your work written in Frame on a Sun to
somebody who uses TROFF on a mainframe and have him edit it, and return it
to you for more edits; I mean it's difficult to get the text you've
produced to work with databases, online documentation systems, information
retrieval software, and so forth. That's why I think it's vitally important
that we beat publishing software vendors on the side of their collective
heads, and demand that they include a capacity to export text in a form
that preserves structural information, and is universally interchangeable.
Hopefully, SGML will provide a way to implement this.
-- 
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             |      Die Welt ist alles, was Zerfall ist.     |
Peter Cash   |       (apologies to Ludwig Wittgenstein)      |cash@convex.com
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Newsgroups: comp.text.frame