On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 09:22:09AM -0400, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
I have to admit that I don't quite understand the above use of the term WYSIWYG; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG I was under the impression that WYSIWYG is a property of the software, not the markup language. You can type HTML markup with a text editor, or use a WYSIWYG editor to create it from your What-You-See layout.
By WYSIWYG, people mean that HTML is typically relative and the layout of a webpage may be different depending on a number of factors.
But even this quality (and I'd discourage usage of WYSIWYG to describe it) isn't specific to HTML in that it applies to most markup languages. LaTeX for instance requires no declaration of page size.
In that sense both markup languages simply describe the structure of documents, leave styling to stylesheets/document-classes and rendering to user-agents/typsetting-software.
This, proponents argue, is one of the great advantages of markup over WYSIWYG editors.
To a small degree, webpages will render different browsers, but even in the same browser the webpage will render differently when the browser is resized, etc.
Setting the negligeable differences between W3C recommendation compliant user agents aside; most substantial differences in rendering (such as flow around blocks depending on window and font sizes) are actually features of multiple-media-compatible markup, not bugs.
For a great example of "what you see is not what you get", try to print a webpage, and compare the printout to what you see on your computer screen: The page needs to be re-rendered to fit onto a piece of paper (especially if you print in "portrait", not "landscape").
Print preview.
Different media calls for different displaying. While this may seem like a disadvantage, markup languages such as HTML actually use this to their great advantage. By seperating content and style, you can prepare a document for several media types with minimal redundancy.
I've printed with both Opera and Firefox. Printouts from both match their print preview renderings.
Instead of going through too much pain developing a tool to convert MW-markup into LaTeX, why don't we just see if modifying the printing style-sheet is sufficient for our needs?
That's the approach that i've been taking, personally. I've done some work on some printing templates that help to format a printed book, but don't look so good on the screen
Do these templates have styles or classes defined in stylesheets?
By putting the style declarations in the print media stylesheet, on-screen rendering won't take them into account.
(how do you render a page break on the computer screen?).
The screen is only one page; so you don't. This is why different media calls for different stylesheets.
I think that there is alot that we could do straight from the HTML, if we avoid things that don't work when printed, and if we are willing to do the work to implement the proper styles for printing.
What, exactly, are the displaying problems that need to be addressed?
I just printed http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Circuit_Theory/Energy_Storage_Elements to a file with Opera and it looked pretty good. I can send it to you or put it up online if you'd like to have a look at my copy.
Cheers, Martin