Re: AWEB; Enhanced Document Encoding

["Patrick Mérissert-Coffinières" <pamc@club-internet.fr>]

But doesn't LyX purport to be WYSIWYM? I think this not just a cute pun.
I discovered TeX (with enthusiasm) about 12 years ago. I used to be a
mathematician longer ago than that, but already at the time I was developping
software. But you do not need to write math. software to need notation, you often
want to use summation signs, underscript indexes, etc... An if you are into design
with assertions, you may want quantifiers and logical symbols. And anyway there
are a lot of areas other than maths where TeX is, from the engineering point of
view, totally unapproachable by any other tool. Of course the language is quite
hard, and even though this kind of puzzle, it was time consuming to use, and I
wished for some kind of WYSIWYGness, though I was already a little wary of it.
Then Leslie Lamport made the very point that Sven Utcke is making: that pure
wysiwyg encouraged people to forget the structure of what they were doing, So I
thing LyX, with the wysiwyM idea is a wonderful approach. In a way it is a
compromise of course, since it is still possible to twist the structure, but at a
higher level, and this is in my mind analogous to high-level languages that do not
prevent totally the programmer from doing unnatural thins, just make it easier for
the willing programmer to resist the temptation of doing so. So I was just as
enthusiastic about discovering LyX (only a few months ago!) that I had been
discovering TeX in the first place.

Sven Utcke wrote:

> "Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com> writes:
>
> > Finally, Sven confirms his hatred of all things WYSIWYG.  Might projects
> > such as LyX change his mind?
>
> Nope.  I realise we will have to install it in order to get students
> to use (La)TeX, but it's really not the right way to do things.  About
> 95% of all TeX-related questions I answer have to do with the fact
> that people try do to WYSIWYG things in LaTeX, things that seem to
> look good (to the untrained eye) but are really just breaking the
> internal logic of the document (independent from the wordprocessor).
> LaTeX usually tries hard to stop them, hence the problems...