[geeks] better word-processing previewing....

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sun, Sep 02, 2001 at 11:17:12AM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 07:12:14PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > [ On Friday, August 31, 2001 at 23:07:17 (+0100), David Cantrell wrote: ]
> > > Yes.  But that doesn't update the display as I update the document, and
> > > it won't go straight to the right part of the right page when I'm editing
> > > working the fifth paragraph of sub-section 3 of section 5 of chapter 9
> > > of my magnum opus.
> > 
> > How incremental do you want the update, and how much CPU do you have?
> 
> Every few seconds would be sufficient, and whilst I have plenty of CPU,
> I don't have enough to regenerate the postscript that often.

You might be able to coax near realtime updates out of postscript without
using too much CPU.  The secret comes from using EPS just to regenerate
the current paragraph.  The difficulty would be dealing with page
wraps.  But, these would probably be easily dealt with by treating the
page as infinate until the paragraph is done, then break things up to fit
on realy pages.
 
> However, I think this fixation on producing postscript and rendering that
> to the screen is wrong.  The existence of (eg) Wordperfect and Word proves
> that what I want can be done in real time on low-end hardware without me
> having to dick around with postscript until I'm ready to send the final
> version off.

Postscript can also run on low end gear just fine.  Using postscript
throughout the programming process is an excelent way to reuse code and
save development time.  
 
> Please don't get me wrong - I don't want a GUI editor.  What I want is
> to be able to edit the document and its structural markup and to have
> a close to real-time display of the effects.

Postscript is great.  Just look at how any program would have had to be
written during the NeWS era or for the Next machines.  They had realtime
displaying word processors.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd