If I see a gap between two lines of text, and that gap vanishes when I commit the document to the web or save it to a file, then it’s not ‘WYSIWYG’. But this has been my experience with 100% of such editors.
I propose a new acronym to replace ‘wizzy-wig’:
WYSMBWYGIYLBIACWBFRTWNBMCTYSSIYUC
What You See Might Be What You Get if You’re Lucky but it Almost Certainly Won’t Be For Reasons That Will Never Be Made Clear to You So Suck it Ya Ugly Cunt
Not as pithy, but at least it’s accurate.
PDF is the only format I know of that is truly WYSIWYG, as it’s intended for print output. But, even with that, you need to know what you’re doing, it’s possible to fuck it up.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call PDF a dumpster fire, but I can tell you that internally it is an absolute unholy mess internally. The fact that you feel like you get consistency out of it 100% comes down to the anal retentive developers who spend insane man hours tweaking the fuck out of their code to get whatever PDF library that they got stuck using from fucking up the image.
The worst part is that Adobe wants PDF to be the one and only format, but also wants to make sure that you have to use their very expensive PDF library to integrate it into your program. So, they constantly fuck with stuff and make changes that break shit. To make it even dumber, their own library doesn’t always keep up with their changes, and when you report the bugs they created, they give no fucks about ever fixing the issue unless you are big enough to for them to care.God fuck PDF.
I’ve hated it from the start in what, 1990-ish?
Eeeeh, no. PDFs will show differently based on the software as soon as it gets a little complex. The only truly reliable PDFs are PDFs that contain… Images.
Unless the fonts are not embedded and you don’t have the right fonts installed
It sounds like you are only talking about html.
Delphi VB6 C# Winforms Qt
These wysiwyg editors usually worked/work without issues.
there was a good HTML editor back in the day called homesite, I made a very popular counterstrike site with it
I’ve just realised I haven’t used anything like that in 20 years. Macromedia Dreamweaver, those were the days!
After a while I realized that Word (the web app) does not render lines of text in the same position as Word (the desktop app), in the very same file. The former seems to use a pseudo random line spacing.
That sounds like something Microsoft would do. They love inconsistencies.
They probably have a whole team of people ensuring that nothing is consistent.
WYSIMOLWIG was coined decades ago.
Was it?
That’s why I refuse to use them. Just use markdown or latex if you want to get fancy with it.
These 2 formats literally do not control how you see the content
I’m fond of WYSISWYG (what you see is sorta what you get).
I’ve made a few apps with wxFormbuilder and they were wysiwyg.
Do they even make them anymore? Last one I used which claimed to be WYSIWYG was Wordsworth on Amiga in the '90s.
Huh? They’re the standard these days.
they’re a huge part of CMSs and enterprise tooling for documentation or support.
Pre-Adobe Dreamweaver.
Macromedia. They ran the Internet for a hot minute.
Shockwave, Flash, Dreamweaver, Coldfusion. My how things change.
I still have my copy of Macromedia Flash 5. Adobe destroyed it, so I made sure to keep my install package.
I’m oddly envious 😄 Then I realize I’d have nothing to do with the output and just get little sad.
I still make stuff with it occasionally, but it’s now limited (due to the aged tech) to linear video clips. Still fun, though.
Yes but the html it generated was a monstrosity. If you wanted to edit it again, you better use dreamweaver.
It definitely did not generate clean html lol but it was wysiwyg
I’ve used WYSIWYG editors for web pages in the late 90s, early 2000s and they did exactly what they claimed to do. 🤷♂️
Also: Klik n Play and The Games Factory were great WYSIWYG game engines that basically were doing what UE5 does with the logic side of things (the flow editor thing where you don’t need to actually write code) way the hell back in 1994.
Gimme that WYSIWYM, LyX.
Try VisualEditor on e.g. Wikipedia. You notice idiosynchrasies if you’re doing something specific or are pretty experienced, but overall, the difference between the editor and the preview (fully rendered page) is trivial unless you’re messing around with a few specific elements (even then, a quick ‘Preview’ fills in this gap).
As shitty as Google is, I’ve been messing about with Google Sites for one project, and I’ve been quite impressed with its WYSIWYG accuracy.
Your options there are limited (which probably plays into how it’s so good), but what it shows you as you build it is pretty much exactly how the website will look when you publish it.
