Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I don't talk about WYSIWYG.  I abhor the very concept of it in the
> context of word processing.  "WYSIWYG" means to say something about
> the relationship between the rendering of the document on screen and
> on printed paper.

My understanding of WYSIWYG is not really that "the printer version is equal
to the screen version" (after all, TeX gets that: the xdvi rendering is the
same as the printer's).  Instead, the underlying idea is that there is no
"deep representation", or at least that you can at most manipulate
it implicitly.

> We can't have that in Emacs.  It would mean that if Emacs is started
> on, say the linux tty, we would have to print the document in light
> gray on black in a font which looks like the linux console font.  It
> would mean that the printed output would look different when I start
> Emacs on a character console, a terminal emulator or on the GUI.

No: most WYSIWYG word-processors will happily accept (and print) colors in
your document, even when your screen is black&white.  I.e. the way it
typically works is that there *is* a deep representation but it can only be
manipulated implicitly through the superficial representation which is
displayed with "the best possible rendering on the current output device".

>> the deep representation (which, AFAIC, is not "just the disk format"
>> but is the format where I can expresss my *intents*, i.e. where I
>> can distinguish between two concepts even if they happen to be
>> rendered identically on the currently used output mode)
> [...]

> Yes, that's a different editing model.

I guess I still don't understand the model you're thinking of, which doesn't
involve an explicit deep representation and yet isn't WYSIWYG either.


        Stefan