Talk:WYSIWYM

This is serious?
I always thought "what you see is what you meant" was black humor about how Lyx likes to hide formatting problems in figures and equations. It will look fine in the editor, but then some invisible element will be mismatched and break the pdf. So what I see is what I meant, but what I get is a different story. --Reuben 02:07, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Where from do you draw this opinion? From both manuals and web pages its quite clear this is meant to be serious. --ps —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.188.224.232 (talk) 10:28, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Definition is probably incomplete
The definition of 'WYSIWYM' in the second paragraph does not differentiate WYSIWYM from pre-LyX formatting systems such as Scribe and several similar systems. The 'obvious' difference seems to be that Scribe et al. were batch-oriented, but it's not clear that that is significant. Some clarification is needed here, I think.Athulin (talk) 06:46, 15 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I think interactivity is significant, but so is visual feedback The current definition says nothing about What You See. I would suggest something like this.
 * WYSIWYM editing systems are interactive editors that provide clear visual feedback as to the structure and content of a document during editing. This visual feedback may be suggestive of the final presentation (e.g. a printed page), but does not seek to accurately reproduce the final presentation at the expense of elucidating content and structure. For example, a section head or document title would be presented in a way that distinguishes it from text that merely happens to have the same final visual presentation. Conversely WYSIWYM editors generally make little attempt to accurately portray aspects of the final presentation that are not due solely to the content; for example pagination results from an interaction between the content and the presentation style (e.g. page size, margin size, font, font size, etc.) and so is generally not shown at all in WYSIWYM editors. Likewise, while in WYSIWYG editors hyphenation, line breaks and the positioning of floating figures, for example, are generally expected to be the same in the editor's display and in the final presentation, in a WYSIWYM editor these aspects are either not shown or are shown in a way not intended to reflect the final presentation. Theodore.norvell (talk) 18:26, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Other WYSIWYM word processors
Currently, the 'Word processors' section of this article only contains information about LyX. I suggest that if there are no other WYSIWYM word processors, this section be absorbed into the rest of the article, rather than standing alone as a section that would really be more at home in the LyX article. Life Now (talk) 21:53, 23 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Word also qualify as WYSIWYM, in my opinion. Theodore.norvell (talk) 17:31, 14 October 2009 (UTC)


 * LyX is not the first WYSIWYM software. Good old Word Perfect 5.1 and all other word processors in the DOS days worked along the same principle. WP had the 'underwater' screen to show formatting coding. Pprevos (talk) 09:13, 6 November 2010 (UTC)


 * LyX is not the first WYSIWYM editor, either. Tex and Latex have the characetristics and advantages of WYSIWYM raised in the section. Lyx is not the first editor for Tex/Latex. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of editors for Tex/Latex. I propose to erase all of this section. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 133.46.60.247 (talk) 08:35, 20 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Texts Markdown is another example of WYSIWYM — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.109.150.114 (talk) 08:54, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Another one is Doctored.js 2404:130:0:1000:7254:D2FF:FE8F:DFB0 (talk) 01:07, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

LyX as first WYSIWYM editor
A link to the LyX website is not a good reference that LyX was the first WYSIWYM editor. Although I believe it really was the first, a better citation is needed. --Diego Queiroz 11:31, 10 February 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Diego Queiroz (talk • contribs)


 * I made some research on the WYSIWYM term. The only relevant occurences in 1994-1998 are in scientific papers with slightly different meaning connected to abstract knowledge representations. The first certain occurence in the context of document processor is 1999 LyX 1.0 announcement, there is also 1998 page discussing LyX 0.12 where the term appears but once can't rule out that it was reedited later on. This perhaps best we can get. Discussing what previous typesetting systems _could_ be understand in terms of WYSIWYM is endless, so better to ask who first really understand himself as WYSIWYM and pushed the term forward for other software projects -- and google records shows it's LyX. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.109.150.114 (talk) 08:21, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Out of date, and possibly not notable
I've flagged the article (in the section "In web environments") as needing update. Also, I note that a couple of the page categories assign the topic High importance, whereas I see little evidence that the topic is even now notable – if it ever was. Accordingly, I propose to change the importance levels to Low, in both Start-class software and Computing categories.

Personally, I find the distinction between WYSIWYM and WYSIWYG interesting, but if it's a worthwhile one, it's still taking an awfully long time to gain traction. So is the topic even of historic value on Wikipedia? I invite readers to consider whether this article should continue to languish here unloved ….

Asking User:Theodore.norvell, User:Diego Queiroz, User:Kvng and User:Yaron K. for input. yoyo (talk) 15:41, 17 October 2017 (UTC)