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

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, September 2, 2001 at 11:17:12 (+0100), David Cantrell wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] better word-processing previewing....
>
> Every few seconds would be sufficient, and whilst I have plenty of CPU,
> I don't have enough to regenerate the postscript that often.

Ah, I see a slight misunderstanding creeping/peeping out of your
response.....   I'll expose it more below....

> > 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.

Herein lies another slight misunderstanding.  I almost always treat
document preparation in an object oriented way -- indeed I've done that
since long before I really knew (beyond Smalltalk) what "OO" was....
It's just like having separate compilation units for your source code,
and a loading-linker to put them all together into one final program.

A large document is simply a collection of objects (smaller documents),
or components in those smaller documents, such as images, tables,
graphs, diagrams, etc.  I don't edit a diagram in a large document by
editing the entire large document's source at once.

I don't see this as a limitation in the tools, but rather a feature of
the tools -- though certainly due to the computing resource requirements
of the underlying implementations they can be seen to "encourage" this
style of document management.

The only time I've ever found this style of document management to be
lacking in any way is for doing magazine-style layout.  However if you
think about it something like Quark's software is really a graphics
editor that has good support for breaking and joining and moving about
chunks of output from a word processor.  With not too much extra magic
you could maybe add the same capability to the likes of xfig by writing
code that could break apart the PostScript output of your word processor
on a line-by-line basis and move about EPSF chunks to lay out a document
on a page-by-page basis.

> Ah, I didn't know that.

Yes, 'gv -watch' gives just about exactly the level of automation
necessary to be able to easily preview changes to complex or subtle
aspects of any small part of a larger document.

> 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.

Ah, here's where you've gotten confused I think.  You see the reason why
people generally poo-pooh "WYSIWYG" and make all kinds of fun about how
it rarely ever gives a true representation of what you'll see on the
printed page is because it's generally always implemented upside down
and backwards, often because of the limitations of low-end hardware.
I.e. the screen rendering is done in different ways from the print
rendering because of the performance issues.

The reason more advanced document management and processing systems
render something like PostScript and then preview it is because that's
the only way to get a real approximation of the final output.  You are
looking at the final output, just with a lower resolution (though almost
all previewers include magnification features to allow you to go from a
preview that has a realistic size to a preview that has a realistic
resolution).

This is, in fact, the way pre-PC computerised typesetting systems always
worked too.  For example the old CompuGraphic typesetting workstations
had a 16x64 (IIRC) ASCII display for entering and editing the source
code, and a high-res (probably 800x1024 at the time) bitmap screen for
previewing the generated output just before it goes to the printer.  I
don't recall compugraphic having a magnification feature for their
preview screen though....

About the only typesetting system that has a (slightly less) device-
specific output format is TeX with it's DVI output.  Unfortunately all
the DVI previewers I've ever seen for X11 suffer exactly the same kinds
of problems most PC-bases so-called WYSIWYG word processors suffer in
that the previewed output is never quite exactly the same as the printed
output.  Xdvi, for example does not render its output in the same way
dvi2ps does and as a result alignment and relative sizes of objects on
the screen may not be the same as their alignment and relative size on
the printed output.

After nearly two decades of producing documents of all kinds and sizes
in the Unix environment I've come to trust only those systems that can
produce, preview, and print, PostScript output.  (Mind you I've never
used any of the fancy and expensive integrated systems such as Interleaf
or FrameMaker, though I've heard enough people complain about them that
I doubt I'd find them to be very much better than any PC-based junk.)

> 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.

Then you *do* really want to generate printer-ready output and preview
that on your screen!  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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