Plain text plus
Dec. 15th, 2005 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinBrad DeLong's lament about Word leads to a bunch of people piling on modern computer interfaces and longing for simpler days.
I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.
What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.
I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.
What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.
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Date: 2005-12-15 08:32 pm (UTC)For Windows and Mac!
I see a great need.
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Date: 2005-12-15 08:51 pm (UTC)In a sense they do already exist; there are any number of notepad-type applications that do something like this, but they're usually optimized for jotting quick notes rather than heavy-duty document writing. I'd actually want it to be a fairly full-featured word processor in some senses, with rich footnote/endnote support, maybe inline figures, table-of-contents generation, etc. Just don't force me to type into a representation of the formatted page so I have to see the margins and page breaks and pull tricks just to avoid looking at a proportional font while I type (I want to be able to see how many spaces I put in). The print preview could be a separate thing.