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Years ago, at the beginning of the academic year, members of my uni class surveyed a few members of the previous year’s intake: Of the two available word-processing tools, LaTeX<\/a> and FrameMaker<\/a>, which was better? We got mixed answers, and each student adopted their preferred choice, and – mostly – stuck with it for the whole year.<\/p>\n At the beginning of the next academic year, members of my uni class were surveyed by the new-comers with the same question. We also gave mixed answers. Universally, the students who had chosen LaTex recommended FrameMaker, and vice versa!<\/p>\n LaTeX differs significantly from FrameMaker in its approach; LaTeX is a mark-up language, while FrameMaker is a WYSIWYG editor.<\/p>\n At Girtby.net<\/a>, Alastair writes to defend the ease of editing Wiki pages over WYSIWYG.<\/a> <\/p>\n He makes some good points. I particularly resonated with the comments that Web authoring is not word processing, and that focussing on the content over the formatting is important. “Ransom note typography” is a great term for a common problem, and I plan to adopt it.<\/p>\n However, I think he misses some key points about WYSIWYG editors that I sorely miss when I am using mark-up languages over web-sites (including in the writing of this blog) .<\/p>\n Some key benefits of WYSIWYG editors over mark-up languages include:<\/p>\n Instant feedback<\/strong> – when editing with a WYSIWYG editor I can see immediately that the wrong action has been taken. The errors that occur here are legion. A couple of common examples include including too many or too few characters within a style and completely mucking up finicky bullet points. With mark-up, these errors are not as visible. I need to spend more time in the boring proof-reading stage to overcome these problems.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Poor spelling-checker integration<\/strong> – my current practice is to enter my blog articles, preview the output and then cut-and-paste into Word for spelling checks. I can’t start<\/em> in Word, because the markup interferes.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n No syntax errors!<\/strong> There is little to compare to the anxiety caused by a LaTeX compilation error when your assignment is due. Your whole document is held to ransom by LaTeX until you find the mismatching brace. With your WYSIWYG document, however, it is ready to go to the printer at any time. To be fair, both Wiki and most HTML browsers are very generous when your markup makes no sense.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n The benefits of tools like Microsoft Outlook over Wiki don’t stop there, because Outlook is a native application while Wiki is a puny little web-site! Few, if any, web-based editors have access to the most basic text-editing features that I desire – nay, demand!<\/p>\n I need multiple levels of undo<\/strong>, to account for my multiple sequential mistakes.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n I would like to see my work spread-out over the entire screen<\/strong>, rather than jammed up in a piddly little text-box in a browser<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The Tab button should mean “indent”<\/strong> first and foremost and “select the next edit box” as a poor second.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n I don’t want to have to re-learn the arcane concepts of escaping reserved characters<\/strong> again<\/em> for today’s markup language. Just look after it for me, okay?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Auto-save!<\/strong> Auto-save! My kingdom for auto-save! Especially in an browser environment, where I don’t get prompted to save my changes when I close a window or hit Back.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Like Alastair, I can see there is room for both worlds. I’ll happily agree that WYSIWYG has some drawbacks. I do appreciate some of the benefits of having the mark-up text available to me; to a degree, I can move the abstractions in my head down on the page where I can see them and correct them. I think that is a call for some compromise, where both the internal workings and the WYSIWYG can be seen. (Word Perfect’s Reveal Codes, anyone?<\/a>)<\/p>\n Ultimately, however, I think the typical author is going to mark something as a 20 point when they want it to be big, even if they are presented with an The sad fact is that Alastair and I are long going to continue to be frustrated by people marking up their text with explicit details of font-size and colour – whether it is through the Comparing WYSIWYG and Markup<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,31,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-geek","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<h2><\/code> tag, a \\subsection{}<\/code> tag, a Heading2 style and<\/em> the ##<\/code> prefix. (Proof? I originally typed “AND” in the last sentence, before remembering that my own house style is not to use capitals for emphasis, but instead to use italics<\/em> – or however that actually appears on your screen… err.. display device?) <\/p>\nFormat | Font<\/code> menu or the font<\/code> tag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"