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

[David Cantrell]

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.

> Hopefully you've arranged to have your PS generated on at most a
> per-chapter basis, not for the entire book at once!!!

I do, but that's largely because of the tools.  It makes more sense to
treat the entire book as one document and to work on that one document,
something which is problematic with current Unixy tools.  That I am
forced to do this is a tool deficiency which I would rather not have
to deal with.

> If your PostScript output conforms to the PS DSC then 'gv -watch' will
> most definitely always re-display the same page you were looking at
> previously and that means you only have to navigate to the table, graph,
> or drawing once, and then watch it flash up with new changes every time
> you save the source.

Ah, I didn't know that.

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.

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.

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

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