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. Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Backronym and Apronym (Discuss) Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and ABC, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced on the basis of this abbreviated written form. ... Memory (Random Access Memory) Look up computing in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (or the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. ... HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ... Clerow Flip Wilson (December 8, 1933 – November 25, 1998) was an African-American comedian and actor. ...

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. Image File history File links Lorem_Ipsum_-_WYSIWYG_en_Latex_-_tekst_als_paden. ... Image File history File links Lorem_Ipsum_-_WYSIWYG_en_Latex_-_tekst_als_paden. ... The LaTeX logo, typeset with LaTeX LATEX, written as LaTeX in plain text, is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. ... The user interface is the part of a system exposed to users. ... For the similarly-named Surrealist journal, see Documents (journal). ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into image (disambiguation). ... A computer display monitor, usually called simply a monitor when the meaning is clear from the context, is a piece of electrical equipment which displays viewable images generated by a computer without producing a permanent record. ... This does not cite any references or sources. ... An example of a web browser (Internet Explorer), displaying the English Wikipedia main page. ... Layout, in publishing, is the process of arranging editorial content, advertising, graphics and other information in a manner that creates an effective presentation. ... A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ...

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 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.

For the origin and evolution of fonts, see History of western typography. ... The term margin has many meanings: In telecommunication, margin has the following meanings: In communications systems, the maximum degree of signal distortion that can be tolerated without affecting the restitution, without its being interpreted incorrectly by the decision circuit. ... Bold Bold, see Bold (disambiguation). ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... For the origin and evolution of fonts, see History of western typography. ... A specialized markup language using SGML is used to write the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary. ... Bold text // Headline text Link title This article is about the computer research center. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979. ... Bravo was the first WYSIWYG document preparation program. ... The Xerox Alto, developed at Xerox PARC in 1973, was the first personal computer and the first computer to use the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI). ... The square shown above is 200 pixels by 200 pixels. ... 1993 Apple LaserWriter Pro 630 laser printer A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. ... A catch phrase is a phrase or expression that is popularized, usually through repeated use, by a real person or fictional character. ... Clerow Flip Wilson (December 8, 1933 – November 25, 1998) was an African-American comedian and actor. ... This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. ... Flip Wilson in character as Geraldine Jones, on a recently released best of DVD set. ... 1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday. ... 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with List of common resolutions. ... A dot matrix printer or impact matrix printer normally refers to a type of computer printer with a print-head that runs back and forth on the page and prints by impact, striking an ink-soaked cloth ribbon against the paper, much like a typewriter. ... The square shown above is 200 pixels by 200 pixels. ... Dots per inch (DPI) is a measure of printing resolution, in particular the number of individual dots of ink a printer or toner can produce within a linear one-inch space. ... MacWrite was a word processor application released along with the first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. ... MacPaint is a bitmap-based image editing computer program that was produced by Apple Computer for bundling with their Macintosh personal computer. ... 1993 Apple LaserWriter Pro 630 laser printer A laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. ... Charles Simonyi (Hungarian: Simonyi Károly; born September 10, 1948, Budapest) is a computer software executive who, as head of Microsofts application software group, oversaw the creation of Microsofts flagship office applications. ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Year 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link displays the 1981 Gregorian calendar). ... Microsoft Word is a word processing application from Microsoft. ...

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). In digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing aliasing (jagged or blocky patterns) when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution. ... Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software by Adobe Systems. ... Microsoft Word is a word processing application from Microsoft. ... TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobes Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. ...

Related acronyms

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: An emoticon (pronounced (IPA) ) is a small piece of specialized ASCII art (usually two to five characters, always on a single line) used in text messages as informal markup to indicate emotions and attitudes that would be conveyed by body language in face-to-face communications. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Backronym and Apronym (Discuss) Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and ABC, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced on the basis of this abbreviated written form. ...

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)

WYFIWYG

What You Feel Is What You Get (refers to haptic real-time 3D modelling combining software and hardware)

WYSIWIS (pronounced wizzy-wis or wuzzy-wis) is an acronym for What You See Is What I See. ... The term computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) was first coined by Greif and Cashman in 1984, at a workshop attended by individuals interested in using technology to support people in their work (Grudin 1994). ... TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... Troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system. ... Garbage In, Garbage Out (abbreviated to GIGO) is an aphorism in the field of computer science. ... WYSIAYG describes a user interface under which What You See Is All You Get: an unhappy variant of WYSIWYG. Visual, `point-and-shoot-style interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be better served by a command... This article is about the typeface Helvetica. ... WYSIWYM is an alternative to WYSIWYG. The acronym refers to slightly different things depending on the context of use. ... WYCIWYG is an acronym for What You Cache Is What You Get. ... Epiphany using Gecko to render the Wikipedia main page Gecko is the open source, free software web browser layout engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives, including later Netscape releases. ... An example of a web browser (Internet Explorer), displaying the English Wikipedia main page. ... Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and a large community of external contributors. ... Look up cache in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A specialized markup language using SGML is used to write the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary. ... HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ... A text mode program communicates with the user by only displaying text and possibly a limited set of predefined semi-graphical characters, which allow the drawing of rudimentary boxes around portions of text, either to highlight the content or to simulate widget or control interface objects found in GUI programs. ... Word processing, in its now-usual meaning, is the use of a word processor to create documents using computers. ... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ... Year 1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the 1991 Gregorian calendar). ... Bottom view of VHS cassette with magnetic tape exposed Top view of VHS cassette with front casing removed The Video Home System, better known by its abbreviation VHS is a recording and playing standard for analog video cassette recorders (VCRs), developed by Victor Company of Japan, Limited (JVC) and launched... HomeSite is a HTML editor currently owned by Macromedia. ... Haptic, from the Greek αφή (Haphe), means pertaining to the sense of touch (or possibly from the Greek word haptesthai meaning “contact” or “touch”). Haptic technology refers to technology which interfaces the user via the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations and/or motions to the user. ...

References

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

See also

• List of HTML editors

The following is a list of HTML editors with articles in Wikipedia. ...

External links

• Comparison table - open source and commercial WYSIWYG web-based editors
• ATPM.com's WYSIWYG: Is it What You Want?
• What has WYSIWYG done to us? - Critical paper about the negative effects the introduction of WYSIWYG has had as of 1996.
• XML: WYSIWYG to WYSIWYM - A brief look at XML document authoring An article on existing XML authoring software (May 2005)
• The Jargon File entry for WYSIWYG