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WYSIWYG (pronounced /ˈwɪziwɪg/[1] or /ˈwɪzɪwɪg/[2]), 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.[3] 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. The expression was later applied to computer applications as the technology became practical. Sometimes it is spelled phonetically, as "Wizywig" or "Wizzywig". WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) is a 2000 album by anarchist punk band Chumbawamba. ...
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. ...
For the formal concept of computation, see computation. ...
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. ...
Application software is a subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly and thoroughly to a task that the user wishes to perform. ...
The World Wide Web and WWW redirect here. ...
HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. ...
Clerow Flip Wilson (December 8, 1933 â November 25, 1998) was an African-American comedian and actor. ...
It is also the brand name of a lighting design tool used mainly in the theatre industry for 3D CAD and pre-visualisation of shows. 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. Compilation of 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 change the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.
Modern software does a 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 producing. 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. ...
This article is about the typesetting system. ...
The user interface is the part of a system exposed to users. ...
For the similarly-named Surrealist journal, see Documents (journal). ...
Look up image in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
A computer display monitor, usually called simply a monitor, is a piece of electrical equipment which displays viewable images generated by a computer without producing a permanent record. ...
A computer printer, or more commonly a printer, produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. ...
An example of a Web browser (Mozilla Firefox) A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. ...
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. A common understanding is that this does not mean "Similar", as stated above, but as close as possible, is an "exact representation" of what the appearance will be.
Historical notes
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS on the IBM PC was a text-only, non-WYSIWYG word processor. Before the invention of WYSIWYG, 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. Image File history File links Wordperfect-5. ...
Image File history File links Wordperfect-5. ...
âFontâ redirects here. ...
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). ...
In typography, italic type /tælk/ or /atælk/ refers to cursive typefaces based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. ...
âFontâ redirects here. ...
A specialized markup language using SGML is used to write the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary. ...
Due to the high cost of computer memory in the early days of microcomputer development, true graphical displays were uncommon and expensive. An early video display was often text-only, constructed from a simple bitmapped character set stored permanently in Read Only Memory in the computer, with each character represented by a single byte of data. Many home computers used standard televisions for the computer screen, and most consumer televisions in the early 1980's were unable to show a high degree of detail without blurring and smearing. The terms storage (U.K.) or memory (U.S.) refer to the parts of a digital computer that retain physical state (data) for some interval of time, possibly even after electrical power to the computer is turned off. ...
The Commodore 64 was one of the most popular microcomputers of its era, and is the best selling model of home computer of all time. ...
Suppose the smiley face in the top left corner is an RGB bitmap image. ...
Rom is also the name of a toy and comic book character Rom (Spaceknight). ...
The home computer is a consumer-friendly word for the second generation of microcomputers (the technical term that was previously used), entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s. ...
Consequently the earliest home computers used a simple text-only display approximately 40 characters wide and 24 characters tall, which at 960 characters allows the entire screen of data to fit into 1 kilobyte of memory. The high cost of making ROMs often limited the available built-in character set so as to not have room for lowercase, accented, boldface, italic, or underlined characters. In order to approach a somewhat more realistic word processing environment, many early word processors such as Bank Street Writer used the microcomputer's graphical display modes to simulate a more proper textual display with true lowercase letters, underlining, and so forth. But because the text was painstakingly drawn character-by-character as a graphical image by software rather than being directly supported in hardware, these graphics-simulated text editors were sluggish and could lag behind the speed of a fast typist. And even though a graphical display permitted more realistic character sets, the text was still usually limited to the printer's built-in fonts due to the large amount of additional memory that bitmapped fonts required and the limited system memory available. Bank Street Writer was a word processor for Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore, Macintosh, and IBM PC computers. ...
Fonts did not become widely understood by the general public until after WYSIWYG became popular. Early word processors had little or no control over the final appearance of the text and relied on whatever fonts were built into the printer, with most dot-matrix printers capable of only three or four fonts referred to as Condensed, Draft, Normal, and Near Letter Quality. The printer font was usually selected from the front panel of the printer and applied to the entire printed document, or in the case of daisy-wheel printers, selected by physically changing the typeface disc prior to printing. Direct control of printer fonts from within a word processor was possible, but usually required long strings of obscure control codes specific to each printer model. In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. ...
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. ...
A dot matrix printer or impact matrix printer 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 first versions of true WYSIWYG word processors allowed the user to only preview the final form of the document on-screen, as a non-editable graphical display. WordPerfect 5.2 offered this, still using the old text-only markup language for the primary document editing, and allowing the user to briefly switch to a graphical mode to see how the document would look when printed. This final rendering was computationally intensive and was consequently slow and clumsy. Due to the deeply ingrained user-experience of past WordPerfect products, as WordPerfect 6.0 made the transition from text-only DOS to a full WYSIWYG Windows 3.x GUI application it still held tightly onto its old code-markup system, offering two main view to the user, one version with the codes, and the other as a proper WYSIWYG live-editable version. Modern word processors still offer an option to show document formatting codes, but this feature is normally hidden from view and must be explicitly activated by the user.
Etymology Origination of this phrase from one of the engineers (Larry Sinclair) at Triple I (Information International) to express the idea that what you see on the screen is what you get on the printer on the "Page Layout System" a pre-press typesetting system at the time called the "AIDS system - Automated Information Documentation System first prototype shown at ANPS in Las Vegas and bought right off the showroom floor by the Pasadena Star News that year. - 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.)
- In parallel with but independent of the work at Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard developed and released in late 1978 the first commercial WYSIWYG software application for producing overhead slides or what today is called presentation graphics. The first release, named "BRUNO" (after an HP sales training puppet), ran on the HP-1000 minicomputer taking advantage of HP's first bit-mapped computer terminal. BRUNO was then ported to the HP-3000 and re-released as "HP Draw".
- 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.
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, also called The Seventies. ...
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 â November 25, 1998) was an African-American comedian and actor. ...
Rowan & Martins Laugh-In was an American comedy television program which ran for 140 episodes from January 22, 1968 to May 14, 1973. ...
Flip Wilson in character as Geraldine Jones, on a recently released best of DVD set. ...
Year 1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday (link shows full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the 1974 Gregorian calendar. ...
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. ...
Display standards comparison The display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. ...
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 (2. ...
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. ...
AUGUST 25 1981 US Marine Sean Vance is Born on the 25th of August {ear nav|1981}} 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 from the vertical. This becomes a problem when trying to lay out text; because older 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 the distortion artifacts known as aliasing 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. ...
Support for WYSIWYG in modern OSs All versions of Mac OS since Mac OS X support unconstrained glyph placement. The positioning and spacing of glyphs on-screen will exactly match printed documents unless a programmer specifically writes their program to act otherwise. This article relates to both the original Classic Mac OS as well as Mac OS X, Apples more recent operating system. ...
Mac OS X (pronounced ) is a line of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ...
Applications for Microsoft Windows that use the Windows Presentation Foundation, included with the OS since Windows Vista, may place glyphs freely. Older Windows programs that use the Graphics Device Interface, the drawing system for all versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista are constrained by whole-pixel glyph positioning unless programmers produce custom text rendering code that calculates individual pixel colours for itself. Windows redirects here. ...
This subsystem is a part of . ...
Windows Vista is a line of graphical operating systems used on personal computers, including home and business desktops, notebook computers, Tablet PCs, and media centers. ...
The Graphics Device Interface (GDI, sometimes called Graphical Device Interface) is one of the three core components or subsystems, together with the kernel and the Windows API for the user interface (GDI window manager) of Microsoft Windows. ...
WYSIWYG and the printing of random textual garbage Printing WYSIWYG documents on serial and parallel printers has long posed a problem if the printer runs out of paper or experiences some other minor error. In the old days of text-only printing, when an error occurred the printer could be safely turned off and back on again, to reset the printer and prepare it to resume printing. However, when a printer is printing in WYSIWYG mode, turning the printer off and on frequently results in the printer erroneously spewing hundreds of blank pages, or pages with random characters all over the paper. In order to provide compatibility with all the old text-only programs, most printers (including the latest color inkjet and laser printers) turn on in a basic text-only printing mode to provide backwards compatibility with old text-only software. In order to print a WYSIWYG document, the printer is sent special control codes telling it to switch to a graphical mode, where all the following data sent to the printer will be used to encode dot positions and color data. When an error occurs and the printer is mistakenly turned off and on by the user, the printer "forgets" it is in graphical printing mode and returns to the default text-only compatibility mode. Most computers cannot tell when a serial or parallel printer has been turned off, so when document printing is resumed the computer is sending raw binary data for encoding dot positions while the printer is expecting to receive plain textual data. The printer now misinterprets the raw binary data as special page formatting controls for line feeds, form feeds, boldface, etc, resulting in the random trash generated by the printer. The volume of raw data needed to print a WYSIWYG document is very large compared to the amount for a plain text-only version, so this printing of garbage can span hundreds of pages for a two-page WYSIWYG document. The fix to this problem is to turn off the printer, tell the computer to cancel the print job, and wait about ten minutes for the communications errors with the turned-off printer to resolve themselves. In severe situations it is necessary to reboot the computer to fully clear out the failed print job. However, a recent somewhat better option has become available with USB printers. The USB interface allows for more status information to be sent between the computer and the printer, including information about device connection and disconnection. If a user turns off a USB printer, the computer is likely to receive a disconnection or turn-off notification, and will be able to gracefully back out and cancel the print job by itself without producing the reams of random garbage that parallel and serial printers would generate.
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: Emoticons originated with text representations. ...
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)
- WYSIWYNG
- What You See Is What You'll Never 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)
- WYSIWYS
- What You See Is What You Sign is an important requirement for electronic signature software. It means that the software has to be able to show you the content without any hidden content before you sign it.
- WYSIWYW
- What You See Is What You Want (used to describe programs which allow to choose between manual and automatic typesetting)
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 (Mozilla Firefox) A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. ...
Firefox redirects here. ...
For other uses, see cache (disambiguation). ...
A specialized markup language using SGML is used to write the electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary. ...
HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for 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. ...
Windows redirects here. ...
Year 1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the 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. ...
HomeSite is a HTML editor currently owned by Macromedia. ...
This article is about haptic technology. ...
References See also The following is a list of HTML editors with articles in Wikipedia. ...
External links |