On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 23:24:11 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

the ad even states 'the size may vary on some other printers'.

that they included a disclaimer is a very big clue.

you might have been impressed with it enough to break from your illicit
piracy habits, but the manufacturer even admits it's *not* an exact
match for what came out of the printer.

If that is your definition of WYSIWYG then modern Apple and Windows
systems are not WYSIWYG in that what comes out of the printer is
rarely an exact match for what you see on the screen. And remember, it
was you, just now, introduce the need for an *exact* match.

wrong. nothing has been introduced. i said that the design of mac os
was the first mainstream computer designed with wysiwyg built into the
os itself (i.e., every app) and that what dos did could only be an
approximation which varied depending on all sorts of factors.

In Message-ID: you wrote:

"the mac was the first mainstream computer to do wysiwyg. all
drawing to the screen used the *same* graphics apis as drawing to
the printer, so whatever was on screen was *exactly* what would
be on paper, regardless of font, size, face or embedded
graphics.the mac was the first mainstream computer to do wysiwyg.
all drawing to the screen used the *same* graphics apis as
drawing to the printer, so whatever was on screen was *exactly*
what would be on paper, regardless of font, size, face or
embedded graphics."

Note your use of 'exactly' and 'exact'. Without having to go back and
quote you can see above where you disqualify Fontasy on the grounds
that "the manufacturer even admits it's *not* an exact match for what
came out of the printer".

For this argument you seem to be requiring that screen pixel pitch and
printer dpi be the same. If this argument is going to hold then you
will have to disqualify virtually every computer made today from being
able to claim WYSIWYG.

you are once again trying to turn this into a semantic argument.

no two of anything are 100% exact.

the point is that the mac was a *lot* closer than anything dos could
possibly do, for all sorts of reasons, only one of which is mentioned
above.

But it was _you_ nospam which disqualified Fontasy on the PC because
the output to the printer might not be exactly the same as what was on
the screen.

You accuse me of playing with semantics but I have to. Words mean one
thing to you if it is you that is writing them but you often attribute
a different meaning when you have to respond to them.

all things considered, what dos did was pretty good given the numerous
limitations of the hardware and software, however, it was not as good
as what the mac could do out of the box.

tl;dr anyone who claims dos can do wysiwyg never used a mac.

one of the key features of the macintosh was wysiwyg as part of the os
itself, which means *all* apps are wysiwyg, and nearly two years before
that ad ran.

and while you were fussing with dot-matrix printers, the mac was
printing wysiwyg to the laserwriter at its native resolution.

Laserwriter was 300 dpi while the resolution of the screen of the
classic Macintosh 512x342 on a 9" screen which equals about 68
pixels/inch. Using the definition you used to disqualify Fontasy on
DOS as WYSIWYG the classic MacIntosh was not WYSIWYG either.

wrong. the size was the same, as was the layout, just at a higher
resolution.

And the original Laserwriter used Postscript fonts which were not
bitmaps but used the PS graphics primitives to draw glyphs as curves,
which can then be rendered at any resolution. This was not the system
used by the MacIntosh with the result that (as you say below) what you
got was not the same as what you had originally seen.

it could use either bitmapped or postscript fonts, the latter of which
along with graphics primitives (shapes, curves, patterns etc.) were
rendered at a higher resolution than what the mac's display could show.
the result was *better* than what was on screen.

So they were not exactly the same. i.e. not exactly WYSIWYG.

do not tell me how macs of the day (or even now) worked. you know less
than what i remember.

it was wygibtwys, what you get is better than what you see.

once again, you don't understand something and choose to argue.

All I'm doing is pinning you down on the ever-shifting ground of your
arguments.

nothing is shifting, except your own lack of understanding.

do not blame me for that.

oh, and the laserwriter had appletalk networking built in. multiple
macs and laserwriters could be networked together using ordinary
telephone cord, which was already in the walls. not only any app, but
any mac on the network could print wysiwyg. nothing on the pc side came
anywhere close to that for many years.

Yep. And that enhanced its WYSIWYG abilities. Please try and stay on
the subject.

it's exactly on subject, and it did enhance its abilities.

a department, or even an entire company, could share a single
laserwriter (or more if needed), where everyone could produce high
quality output.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens