[geeks] Re: [rescue] Re: nuking from orbit

[David Cantrell]

BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:

> It is all in how you think about documents.  I have found that if you
> don't have to worry about positioning everything WYSIWYG, you can write
> input and think clearer on the fly, in raw text mode.  If you are a touch
> typist, you don't have to do much to add in the markup.  If you are not
> a touch typist, then it can be hectic.  The markup does the positioning.
> It does it at the end after the input is created.  You don't worry with it.
> In WYSIWYG, you are constantly doing the positioning as you go.  That may
> not be so bad on small docs, but on long manuscripts and complex books,
> etc., it can be a nightmare (e.g., the hair pulling our secretaries do).

I rather liked the Word Perfect way of doing things.  Even in the GUI
versions, you could, as well as the usual WYSIWYG, split the screen into
two, one being plain fixed-width text with formatting codes visible, the
other being a WYSIWYG rendition of the section you were working on.  When
I'm TeXing, I really miss that.  And Lyx, whilst I like it, isn't mature
enough for full-time use.  The table rendering, in particular, is a bit
crap.

Pity their Windows product was such a steaming pile of dung in other
areas.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ``I know, I'll use
  regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems.        -- jwz