If I see a gap between two lines of text, and that gap vanishes when I commit the document to the web or save it to a file, then it’s not ‘WYSIWYG’. But this has been my experience with 100% of such editors.
I propose a new acronym to replace ‘wizzy-wig’:
WYSMBWYGIYLBIACWBFRTWNBMCTYSSIYUC
What You See Might Be What You Get if You’re Lucky but it Almost Certainly Won’t Be For Reasons That Will Never Be Made Clear to You So Suck it Ya Ugly Cunt
Not as pithy, but at least it’s accurate.
Personally I feel like they’re generally pretty good at WYSIWYG. What they’re bad at is WYSIWYW (What You See Is What You Want).
After I do a bunch of work in Word and I have a bunch of garbage, when I load that file back I still have the same garbage. If I print it, I get the same garbage. So yeah, I get what I see.
Is that what I want? No, I want not-garbage.
Anyone remember WordPerfect coming out with “reveal codes” and allowing you to basically edit the markup and fix the issues?
Word was never good with layout. Move one picture or text block on a page for just a tenth of a mm, and it can easily fuck up the whole page layout.
Exactly. You never get what you want, but you certainly get whatever crap you see.
I don’t believe Word ever claimed to be WYSIWYG.
It certainly has been marketed as one, but regardless, it is one. The commenter you’ve replied to isn’t saying otherwise, they’re saying it’s difficult to achieve the desired outcome.
Fuck me, 3.2mb program size, 1mb RAM to run it.
How in God’s name is word now about 1000 times that size and needs 400 times more RAM?
Hey, hey, 16K
What does that get you today?
You need more than that for a letter
Old-school RAMpacks are much better
Wow congratulations for dusting off the 36 year old marketing material! I’m not sure features in software respect 36 year statutes of limitation though. I suspect it no longer lives up to this claim. At least in my experience it doesn’t, unless you count only in print preview but not in actual editing.
Lol the double-down is always funny.
Everyone else here is getting the same page layout from Word in print that they see on the screen!?! Honestly more surprised than anything. I don’t remember it ever happening.
With default settings, I do. Every document I remember. The only difference is semitransparent header and footer in the GUI. Maybe you’ve enabled the fullscreen/reader view that usually breaks everything, or it’s default on web or mobile.
I achieved high proficiency with Office 2013 and honestly, it’s not fully WYSIWYG, you have to do things like toggle field codes for some advanced stuff but 99.9 % of work done by Word users is in WYSIWYG mode. As for what-you-see-is-what-you-want? Well, hard no.
Who said anything like that?
But also yes. If you’re viewing a Word doc in page view, it’s going to look the same when you print it.
That’s true for when you use it as well. Apparently your memory is terrible.
I must never use page view then
Hah, just a quick search for the image, but the point is that your average word processor is WYSIWYG – so much so that the phrase has fallen out of fashion, because any other concept (e.g. a TeX client like LaTeX) is foreign to your typical user. You edit the formatted document directly, and it’ll always look the same on screen and print as it did at the point of edit.
Granted you can enable alternate views in MS Word, like draft layout or web layout, but they’re not the default.
The one caveat is that documents made in the Word Desktop app can look different if opened in O365
After a while I realized that Word (the web app) does not render lines of text in the same position as Word (the desktop app), in the very same file. The former seems to use a pseudo random line spacing.
That sounds like something Microsoft would do. They love inconsistencies.
They probably have a whole team of people ensuring that nothing is consistent.
Pre-Adobe Dreamweaver.
Yes but the html it generated was a monstrosity. If you wanted to edit it again, you better use dreamweaver.
It definitely did not generate clean html lol but it was wysiwyg
Macromedia. They ran the Internet for a hot minute.
Shockwave, Flash, Dreamweaver, Coldfusion. My how things change.
I still have my copy of Macromedia Flash 5. Adobe destroyed it, so I made sure to keep my install package.
I’m oddly envious 😄 Then I realize I’d have nothing to do with the output and just get little sad.
I still make stuff with it occasionally, but it’s now limited (due to the aged tech) to linear video clips. Still fun, though.
Gimme that WYSIWYM, LyX.
That’s why I refuse to use them. Just use markdown or latex if you want to get fancy with it.
These 2 formats literally do not control how you see the content
As shitty as Google is, I’ve been messing about with Google Sites for one project, and I’ve been quite impressed with its WYSIWYG accuracy.
Your options there are limited (which probably plays into how it’s so good), but what it shows you as you build it is pretty much exactly how the website will look when you publish it.
I’ve just realised I haven’t used anything like that in 20 years. Macromedia Dreamweaver, those were the days!
It sounds like you are only talking about html.
Delphi VB6 C# Winforms Qt
These wysiwyg editors usually worked/work without issues.
I’ve used WYSIWYG editors for web pages in the late 90s, early 2000s and they did exactly what they claimed to do. 🤷♂️
Also: Klik n Play and The Games Factory were great WYSIWYG game engines that basically were doing what UE5 does with the logic side of things (the flow editor thing where you don’t need to actually write code) way the hell back in 1994.
I came to say I feel like word processors did what I wanted at one point and then just sorta stopped.
Do they even make them anymore? Last one I used which claimed to be WYSIWYG was Wordsworth on Amiga in the '90s.
Huh? They’re the standard these days.
they’re a huge part of CMSs and enterprise tooling for documentation or support.
Shame you never had the misfortune of having to use NetObjects Fusion. Tables nested like an oversized fractal matryoshka doll.
there was a good HTML editor back in the day called homesite, I made a very popular counterstrike site with it
Seamonkey
WDTANMB
WYSIMOLWIG was coined decades ago.
Was it?
It’s been mentioned in the hacker file for at least 30 years, see https://home.nvg.org/~venaas/jargon/jargon_37.html#TAG2012
