Wysiwyg is – as probably everybody knows – short for “What you see is what you get”. It was the great hype of 20 years ago and the death of the likes of symbol-oriented UNIX terminals (VT-100 compatible) and many other beautiful applications.
We at InterFace, too, were convinced that in the future everything had to be “wysiwyg”. Therefore, we developed first HIT/CLOU and then MagicHIT. For X windows and MS windows. With ODA-ODIF, and fascinating semantics in the documents. It was great, but economically spoken it was not (at all) a success.
We were deeply impressed by the first sensible desktop publisher – all “wysiwyg”! It was the “frame maker”. To us, Microsoft Word was the one and only “wysiwyg” editor for all possible situations of life, the product of the future – which is exactly what it really got to be.
Today, I see it differently.
Whenever I witness colleagues struggling to fill in the common document forms in “word” when big applications are written, I think of how much time could be saved by using LaTeX. But I think it is more prudent not to say this out loud, because a sensible proposition like this might not be looked upon favourably. After all, living the rest of my life in a nuthouse is not a concept that sounds attractive to me.
All students with a little sense write their diploma or dissertational thesis in LaTeX, rather than word. It save a lot of time and nerves. And writing a competitive bidding is no less demanding than writing a dissertational thesis. But it takes a lot of moral courage to propose LaTeX as a tool.
There are, however, quite a few tools that do not use “wysiwyg” and are therefore highly efficient. Not long ago, Herr Oppelt of b-sys showed us how a competitive bidding can be easily written – not using Microsoft word at all. On hearing that, Maximilian immediately remembered our admin team, who are constantly struggling with word and its document forms. Consequently, we decided to buy a b-sys test version.
Or take the TextEdit on my apple computer! Ever since I started using it, using NeoOffice moves more and more to the background. I am even happy with the new wordpress. All I have to do is write an article, look it over quickly – and that is it.
Just imagining what it would be like to blog with word…
I would probably end up looking for a new “hobby” quite fast!
After writing all this, I dare say it out loud: I quite seriously believe that we waste a lot of time using wysiwyg office systems.
RMD
(translated by EG)
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