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.
PDF is the only format I know of that is truly WYSIWYG, as it’s intended for print output. But, even with that, you need to know what you’re doing, it’s possible to fuck it up.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call PDF a dumpster fire, but I can tell you that internally it is an absolute unholy mess internally. The fact that you feel like you get consistency out of it 100% comes down to the anal retentive developers who spend insane man hours tweaking the fuck out of their code to get whatever PDF library that they got stuck using from fucking up the image.
The worst part is that Adobe wants PDF to be the one and only format, but also wants to make sure that you have to use their very expensive PDF library to integrate it into your program. So, they constantly fuck with stuff and make changes that break shit. To make it even dumber, their own library doesn’t always keep up with their changes, and when you report the bugs they created, they give no fucks about ever fixing the issue unless you are big enough to for them to care.
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.
Gimme that WYSIWYM, LyX.
Try VisualEditor on e.g. Wikipedia. You notice idiosynchrasies if you’re doing something specific or are pretty experienced, but overall, the difference between the editor and the preview (fully rendered page) is trivial unless you’re messing around with a few specific elements (even then, a quick ‘Preview’ fills in this gap).
I’ve just realised I haven’t used anything like that in 20 years. Macromedia Dreamweaver, those were the days!
Seamonkey
Shame you never had the misfortune of having to use NetObjects Fusion. Tables nested like an oversized fractal matryoshka doll.
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
