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WYSIWYG

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For the Chumbawamba album, see WYSIWYG (album).

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BOO WYSIWYG (IPA Pronunciation [wɪziwɪg] or [wiziwɪg]), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product.[1] It is commonly used for word processors, but has other applications, such as Web (HTML) authoring. The phrase was originally popularized by comedian Flip Wilson, whose character "Geraldine" would often say this to excuse her quirky behavior.

Meaning

The program on the left uses a WYSIWYG editor to produce a document. The program on the right contains LaTeX code, which when compiled will produce a document that will look very similar to the document on the left. Compiling formatting code is not a WYSIWYG process.
  • The term describes a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document or image is being created. For example, a user can view on screen how a document will look when it is printed to paper or displayed in a Web browser.
  • It implies the ability to modify the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.

Modern software does a fairly good job of optimizing the screen display for a particular type of output. For example, a word processor is optimized for output to a typical printer. The software often emulates the resolution of the printer in order to get as close as possible to WYSIWYG. However, that is not the main attraction of WYSIWYG, which is the ability of the user to be able to visualize what he or she is doing.

In many situations, the subtle differences between what you see and what you get are unimportant. In fact, applications may offer multiple WYSIWYG modes with different levels of "realism," including:

  • A composition mode, in which the user sees something somewhat similar to the end result, but with additional information useful while composing, such as section breaks and non-printing characters, and uses a layout that is more conducive to composing than to layout.
  • A layout mode, in which the user sees something very similar to the end result, but with some additional information useful in ensuring that elements are properly aligned and spaced, such as margin lines.
  • A preview mode, in which the application attempts to present a representation that is as close to the final result as possible.

Applications may deliberately deviate or offer alternative composing layouts from a WYSIWYG because of overhead or the user's preference to enter commands or code directly.

Historical notes

  • Before the invention of WYSIWYG, all text and control characters appeared in the same typeface and style with little indication of layout (margins, spacing, etc.). Users were required to enter code tags to indicate that some text should be in boldface, italics, or a different typeface or size. These applications used an arbitrary markup language to define the tags. Because of its simplicity, this method remains popular for some basic text editing applications.
  • The phrase was originated by a newsletter published by Arlene and Jose Ramos, called WYSIWYG. It was created for the emerging Pre-Press industry going electronic in the late 1970s. After 3 years of publishing, the newsletter was sold to employees at the Stanford Research Institute in California. The first conference on the topic was organized by Jonathan Seybold and the first technology popularized at Xerox PARC during the late 1970s when the first WYSIWYG editor, Bravo, was created on the Alto. The Alto monitor (72 pixels per inch) was designed so that one full page of text could be seen and then printed on the first laser printers. When the text was laid out on the screen 72 PPI font metric files were used, but when printed 300 PPI files were used — thus one would occasionally find characters and words slightly off, a problem that continues to this day. (72 PPI came from a new measure of 72 "PostScript points" per inch. Prior to this, the standard measure of 72.27 points per inch was used in typeface design, graphic design, typesetting and printing.)
  • Seybold and the researchers at PARC were simply reappropriating a popular catch phrase of the time originated by "Geraldine", Flip Wilson's drag persona from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In in the late 60s and and then on The Flip Wilson Show, (1970–1974).
  • The Apple Macintosh system was originally designed so that the screen resolution and the resolution of the dot-matrix printers sold by Apple were easily scaled: 72 PPI for the screen and 144 DPI for the printers. Thus, the on-screen output of programs such as MacWrite and MacPaint were easily translated to the printer output and allowed WYSIWYG editing. With the introduction of laser printers, resolutions deviated from even multiples of the screen resolution, making WYSIWYG harder to achieve.
  • Charles Simonyi, the PARC researcher responsible for Bravo, joined Microsoft in 1981 to start development of application programs at Microsoft. Hence, Bravo can be seen as the direct ancestor of Microsoft Word.

Problems of implementation

Because designers of WYSIWYG applications typically have to account for a variety of different output devices, each of which has different capabilities, there are a number of problems that must be solved in each implementation. These can be seen as trade-offs between multiple design goals, and hence applications that use different solutions may be suitable for different purposes.

Typically, the design goals of a WYSIWYG application may include:

  • Provide high-quality printed output on a particular printer
  • Provide high-quality printed output on a variety of printers
  • Provide high-quality on-screen output
  • Allow the user to visualise what the document will look like when printed

It is not usually possible to achieve all of these goals at once.

The major problem to be overcome is that of varying output resolution. As of 2007, monitors typically have a resolution of between 92 and 125 pixels per inch. Printers generally have resolutions between 240 and 1440 pixels per inch; in some printers the horizontal resolution is different to the vertical. This becomes a problem when trying to lay out text; because most output technologies require the spacing between characters to be a whole number of pixels, rounding errors will cause the same text to require different amounts of space in different resolutions.

Solutions to this include:

  • Always laying out the text using a resolution higher than you are likely to use in practice. This can result in poor quality output for lower resolution devices (although techniques such as anti-aliasing may help mitigate this), but provides a fixed layout, allowing easy user visualisation. This is the method used by Adobe Acrobat.
  • Laying out the text at the resolution of the printer the document will be printed on. This can result in low quality on-screen output, and the layout may sometimes change if the document is printed on a different printer (although this problem occurs less frequently with higher resolution printers, as rounding errors are smaller). This is the method used by Microsoft Word.
  • Laying out the text at the resolution for the output device it will be sent to. This often results in changes in layout between the on-screen display and printed output, so is rarely used. It is common in web page designing tools that claim to be WYSIWYG, however.

Other problems that have been faced in the past include printers that have a selection of fonts that are not identical to those used for on-screen display (largely solved by the use of downloadable font technologies like TrueType) and matching color profiles between different devices (mostly solved now thanks to printer drivers with good color model conversion software).

As with variations on the smiley, creating variations on the acronym WYSIWYG is something of a game. Many variations are used only to illustrate a point or make a joke, and have very limited real use. Some that have been proposed include, in order of increasing obscurity:

WYSIWIS
What You See Is What I See (used in context of distant multi-users applications, e.g. CSCW)
WYSIWYAF
What You See Is What You Asked For (in reference to programs such as those used for manual typesetting such as TeX or troff, that what is retrieved from the system is what the user specified - in essence, a statement of GIGO; sometimes also YAFIYGI: You Asked For It, You Got It)
WYSIAYG
What You See Is All You Get (used to point out that a style of "heading" that refers to a specification of "Helvetica 15 bold" provides more useful information than a style of "Helvetica 15 bold" every time a heading is used)
WYSIWYM
What You See Is What You Mean (You see what best conveys the message)
WYCIWYG
What You Cache is What You Get ("wyciwyg://" turns up occasionally in the address bar of Gecko-based Web browsers like Mozilla Firefox when the browser is retrieving cached information) -or - What You Create Is What You Get -or- What You Click Is What You Get)
WYGIWYG
What You Get Is What You Get (an alternative approach to document formatting using markup languages, e.g. HTML, to define content and trusting the layout software to make it pretty enough)
WYSYHYG
What You See You Hope You Get (/wɪzihɪg/) (a term ridiculing text mode word processing software; used in the Microsoft Windows Video Collection, a video distributed around 1991 on two VHS cassettes at promotional events).
WYSIWYN
What You See Is What You Need (used in context of a code centric user interface as an opposite to the WYSIWYG user interface, e.g. in reference to the HTML editor HomeSite)
WYSIWYP
What You See Is What You Print (wizzy-whip) (refers to the ability of a computer system to print colors exactly as they appear on a monitor. WYSIWYP printing requires a special program, called a color management system (CMS) to calibrate the monitor and printer).
WYSINWYG
What You See Is Not What You Get (a joke about how WYSIWYG editors don't always work)

References

  1. ^ "Compact Oxford English Dictionary: WYSIWYG". Oxford University Press.

See also

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