[jpalomaki]

What we should really do is abandon the WYSIWYG approach to document editing. This inevitably leads into vendor lock in.

Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content. Formats like markdown are nice, because they force you to do this. The old way made sense 30 yers ago when information was consumed on paper.

[Ekaros]

Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience...

Ofc, if we stop really caring what things look like we could save lot of energy and time. Just go back to pure HTML without any JavaScript or CSS...

[lcnielsen]

> Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience...

Having written many papers, reports and my entire Ph. D. thesis in Latex, and also moved between LaTeX classes/templates when changing journals... I'm inclined to agree to an extent. I think every layout system has a final hand-tweaking component (like inline HTML in markdown for example), but LaTeX has a very steep learning curve once you go beyond the basic series of plots and paragraphs. There are so many tricks and hacks for padding and shifting and adjusting your layout, and some of them are "right" and others are "wrong" for really quite esoteric reasons (like which abstraction layer they work at, or some priority logic).

Of course in the end it's extremely powerful and still my favourite markup language when I need something more powerful than markdown (although reStructuredText is not so bad either). But it's really for professionals with the time to learn a layout system.

Then again there are other advantages to writing out the layout, when it comes to archiving and accessibility, due to the structured information contained in the markup beyond what is rendered. arXiv makes a point about this and forces you to submit LaTeX without rendering the PDF, so that they can really preserve it.

[homebrewer]

> if we stop really caring what things look like we could save lot of energy and time

Yet simple Markdown documents automatically converted into pdf by pandoc look ten times better than most MS Office documents I've had to deal with over the past couple of decades. Most MS Office users have very little knowledge of its capabilities and do things like adjusting text blocks with spaces, manually number figures (which results in broken references that lead to the wrong figure — or nowhere), manually apply styles to text instead of using style presets (resulting in similar things being differently styled), etc.

[dathinab]

> Looking at Latex, I don't think hand tuning some parameters until you get right look in every single case is much better user experience...

In my experience you do that more in Word then in Latex (the I added some paragraphs here and wtf is that picture two pages later doing now problem).

The issue is to some degree quite fundamental to the underlying challenges of laying out formatted text with embedded things, affecting both word and LaTex.

through that is assuming you now how to properly use Word / LaTex if you don't you can cause yourself a huge amount of work ;)

[techjamie]

I've been quite happy with using Typst to write things at home. It's less arcane than LaTeX and easier to reason about.

At work I use our ChatGPT page to generate an HTML+CSS skeleton of what I want and tweak that. It's quicker for me than doing the equivalent in word, and easier to manipulate later. Most of the time I don't need anyone else editing my docs, so it works out.

[DemocracyFTW2]

Latex is just as bad as WYSIWYG, pure unadultered TeX is what real programmers use! Of course, real hardcore programmers just bathe their hard drives in showers of cosmic rays until just the right bits have flipped et voila!—document ready

[mannycalavera42]

I am a pro when it comes to M-x butterfly

[constantcrying]

I don't think WYSIWYG is the issue here, WYSIWYG editors for markdown exist. It is the premise that document creation is about representing a piece of paper digitally.

For most documents nowadays it makes no sense to see them as a representation of physical paper. And the word paradigm of representing a document as a if it were a piece of paper is obsolete in many areas where it is still being used.

Ironically Atlassian, with confluence, is a large force pushing companies away from documents as a representation of paper.

[xcrunner529]

People inevitably want to print the contents, never mind the implications of column size for ease of reading.

[constantcrying]

>People inevitably want to print the contents

For most content this is not the case. It is also obviously easier to go from a page agnostic format to a format which relies intrinsically on page size.

[znpy]

This could only work if all people using computers are tech people, and willing to spend a couple of months learning latex or whatever.

None of the two conditions are reality, of course.

So yeah, that’s not happening.

[redeeman]

no, instead they spend all their professional life not knowing what they work with, and waste much more time accumulated.

[znpy]

> no, instead they spend all their professional life not knowing what they work with, and waste much more time accumulated.

exactly, and that's great.

do you really think surgeons/nurses waste time getting intimate knowledge of all the machines they use?

Do you really think bus drivers have intimate knowledge of the engines of their buses, transmission lines etc?

come on, be reasonable.

[ozim]

Not fun part is that focusing on content will lead you to a place where you get customers using BS arguments for power play.

You want to be able to do everything just right for the looks. Because there always will be someone negotiating down because your PDF report does not look right and they know a competitor who „does this heading exactly right”.

In theory if you have garbled content that is not acceptable of course, but small deviations should be tolerated.

Unfortunately we have all kinds of power games where you want exact looks. You don’t always have option to walk away from asshole customers nitpicking on BS issues.

[dathinab]

even many of the very widely used LaTex "editors" do have some semi live "preview" feature which often allow some WYSIWYG like features in the preview

similar if someone random non technical person just needs to write idk. 5 paragraphs of text with a head line, no high requirements for formatting, no kind of templates, no anything fancy why would you force them to not have WYSIWYG if that is the perfekt fit for their use case in every single aspect?

Similar markdown doesn't scale to a lot of writing requirements, like _AT ALL_. I know because I have written pretty much any thesis or larger reports etc. during my studies in markdown. And I had to step out of markdown all the time. Weather that is by using inline latex, or by tweaking markdown to PDF conversion templates (by interleaving non mark down sources with markdown by splitting the markdown into many different files and folders which each could be markdown or anything else, and/or inline latex to include non markdown sources imported into latex) etc. It was a nice pipeline, but it also wasn't really markdown anymore, but instead some amalgamation of markdown LaTex and other things. As a programmer that was fine, but that doesn't scale at all to the "standard" user of office applications.

[mawadev]

Do HTML WYSIWYG editors ever lead to vendor locking?

[ZiiS]

Yes, Frontpage tried to lock reading to Internet Explorer and hosting to IIS several times. Even with the best will in the world switching editors lost fidelity.

[nikanj]

HTML WYSIWYG editors lead to eldrich horrors, the likes of which haven’t been seen since someone tried parsing HTML with regex

[sixtyj]

Wix, Webflow, WordPress… I have tried all wysiwyg editors (block editors). Oh my, what a mess in html, if you try to edit a file manually…

[p_ing]

> Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content.

Many documents are created for looks rather than content.

[piker]

Not sure why you're getting so downvoted. It's a totally reasonable opinion in 2025 but it faces massive adoption headwind. People still cling to the idea of printing pages of documents even if it's increasingly rare (even, say in legal) for them to do so.

[Arainach]

This is getting downvoted because it's ludicrous. Users want WYSIWIG - documents that are what appears on the printer page or when people they share the document to open it.

"Interoperability" is something technical enthusiasts talk about and not something that users creating documents care about outside of the people they share with seeing exactly what was created.

[nlitened]

as you say, tech enthusiasts only _talk_ about interoperability, but very very few actually care about it. Try interoperating between two pieces of code written in two different languages without spinning up an HTTP server or a separate virtual machine with a database system. Not even two different languages, just between two major versions of the same damn programming language.

[piker]

I think you're missing the point that the "G" in WYSIWIG is "when printed". Everybody wants uniform rendering across applications in the way that, say, websites render uniformly across browsers. But fewer people care today what it looks like when printed--they're never going to print it anyway. They're just going to docusign it and call it a day.

In other words, fidelity to the printed page isn't really as important or as magical today as it was in 1984.

[Arainach]

No, the G is "get". Users want to create documents in their presentation format. When they create a table they want to see a table, not a bunch of pipes and plus signs. When they create a hyperlink they want to see the link text, not the URL and a bunch of brackets.

[piker]

Yes, the markup is hidden and the document is rendered in all cases. The point I was making, and I believe the parent was making, is that it doesn't have to be wed to the physical medium. Perhaps we're talking past each other here.

[Arainach]

Writing markdown is decidedly not WYSIWIG. Storing documents with a WYSIWIG editor in a markdown-like format isn't viable either - look how frustrated word processor users get if changing one element repositions another ("all my pictures move"). Users want things in a precise format.

[herbst]

But then always when there are websites that DO NEED to get printed, you can be sure you are going to print at least the full footer, several ad banners and one or two pages with basically no content as well.

[bboygravity]

Yeah and let's all move to Arch Linux without any Window manager. And you have to write your own driver to use wifi.

Death to user friendlyness! Advanced users only! /s

[fxtentacle]

Try to create a PDF report with collapsible subheadings in Excel. After you have learned the necessary MacroScript and JavaScript to pull that off, writing a Wi-Fi driver will feel like a joke in comparison.

[herbst]

This! In my school time I usually worked around using any office tools which appeared way simpler for me than learning office tools. Statistics in ruby, markdown instead of word and I had the most beautiful CSS & html only presentations.

I was to 99% bound to editor and terminal and comfortable. In no world would a excel or word fit into my workflow

I still do, but today nobody is expecting me to use specific software anymore so it feels less rebellious