Re: Bibliography & ToC placement

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Wed, Feb 18, 1998 at 09:36:14AM -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:

> address@hidden wrote:
> > 
> > Sure would be nice to have a WYSIWYG editor for someone like my wife that
> > stored in lout format.
> 
> What you want is a word processor that *works*. Word's file format has
> almost nothing to do with its problems nad I think that lout format
> would actually be a step backwards. Working with a programmable format
> in a WYSIWYG editor would be more prone to bugs and crashing than
> working with the (mostly) non-programmable formats that Word accepts.

Completely agreed.

Lout to a page description language (PDL, e.g. PostScript) is like a
high level programming langauge (HLL) to machine instructions.

Word processor can generate Lout code or TeX code instead of PDL, just
like most compilers genereate assembly language instead of binary
object files.  Some compilers, especially for VHLL, even use C as
their target language.

All those visual codeless programming tools usually store user design
in some fixed internal format.  They generate actual code in target
HLL or in machine code upon user request.  Just like Word will
generate PostScript or some other PDL when it's time to print the
document.  No word processor stores its documents in PDL internally.

Writing documents in Lout, TeX, or troff *is* a programming.  We just
use these document formatters (read compilers) to avoid writing
PostScript or DVI or plain text directly.  We let formatter to take
care about margins, text adjustment, fonts &c just like we rely on
compiler to perform memory allocation, function calling conventions &c.

Even if a Lout WYSIWYG is possible, the format is no longer Lout,
though something that is syntactically a valid Lout, but has some
additional extralinguistic conventions.  But then one gain nothing by
using this [pseudo]Lout as *internal* format.  *Producing* Lout, of
course, is welcome :-).

SY, Uwe
-- 
address@hidden                         |       Zu Grunde kommen
http://www.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/            |       Ist zu Grunde gehen