RE: Simonyi Interview

[Mitch Stone <mstone@vc.net>]

In reply to claribba's message sent 12/30/97 11:26 PM:

>Maybe WYSIWYG means different things to different people.  My
>interpretation is that what shows on the screen is exactly what comes out
>of the printer, something I've never been able to accomplish with DOS,
>WINxx,WINx.x, or MAC or any of the compatible word processing apps,
>although the old Wordstar came close.  If I want precision, I use my CP/M
>machine for wp, dtp,  and graphics.  

True WYSIWYG is a practical impossibility given the current technology, 
at least if you're talking about any reasonably sophisticated level of 
output, and for a whole host of quite obvious reasons. The first efforts 
at WYSIWYG, I believe, were at Xerox PARC, where they lashed photocopier 
printers to the Alto computer during the 1970s. 

The Mac's implementation of WYSIWYG normalized the proportions on the 
screen to those of the printer, so in effect you could stick paper output 
onto the monitor, and it would match, and the placement of type would 
match output (it does). The fly in the ointment (before dealing with 
color, which is another matter altogether) was/is the conversion of 
QuickDraw (the Mac display scheme) to Postscript, the printing 
technology. (The use of Display Postscript by Next was an effort to 
eliminate one layer of interpretation between the CRT display and the 
printer.)

In an effort to have this all work and make sense, the Mac's display 
resolution was normalized to 72 dpi, so if you needed a larger workspace, 
you added a larger display (resolutions can now be changed, but not 
originally). With Windows, if you stick on a larger display, the entire 
screen image just gets bigger.

What WYSIWYG tended to do was to introduce users to a whole host of 
issues which had previously been the domain of the printing industry -- 
typographical issues such as kerning and leading, and imaging issues, 
such as halftones and line screens.

   Mitch Stone
+---
   Editor, Boycott Microsoft ** http://www.vcnet.com/bms 

   Like medieval peasants, computer manufacturers and millions of 
   users are locked in a seemingly eternal lease with their evil 
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                            --- Mark Harris, Electronics Times