On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 23:24:08 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

I remember Fontasy, and there were several such programs available prior
to that with less layout capability. People who think WYSIWYG requires
OS-based GUIs don't understand that WYSISYG means only what it says; one
knows what one will get prior to printing it out.

people who think dos could do wysiwyg don't realize that the mac did it
*better*, and without any of the fuss.

wysiwyg on dos was an approximation, perhaps close enough for whatever
you were doing, but there was a lot of room for improvement.

Same thing applied to the classic MacIntosh.

no.

the mac spawned the desktop publishing industry, not dos or even
windows.

No doubt the arrival of the MacIntosh and Laserwriter was important
but "spawning" is bit of a stretch. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing

it's not a stretch, which your own link *confirms*.

"Desktop publishing was first developed at Xerox PARC in the
1970s.[1][2]

first developed != spawned an industry.

A contradictory claim states that desktop publishing
began in 1983 with a program developed by James Davise at a community
newspaper in Philadelphia.[3] The program Type Processor One ran on a
PC using a graphics card for a WYSIWYG display and was offered
commercially by Best info in 1984.[4] (Desktop typesetting with only
limited page makeup facilities had arrived in 1978Â*9 with the
introduction of TeX, and was extended in the early 1980s by LaTeX.)

tex/latex is the *opposite* of wysiwyg.

The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of
the Apple LaserWriter printer, and later in July with the introduction
of PageMaker software from Aldus, which rapidly became the DTP
industry standard software. Later on, PageMaker overtook Microsoft
Word in professional DTP in 1985.

thereby proving my claim.

it's always amusing when someone tries to argue and ends up proving
themselves wrong.

The term "desktop publishing" is
attributed to Aldus founder Paul Brainerd,[5] who sought a marketing
catch-phrase to describe the small size and relative affordability of
this suite of products, in contrast to the expensive commercial
phototypesetting equipment of the day."

further proof.

And see

"Users of the PageMaker-LaserWriter-Macintosh 512K system endured
frequent software crashes,[7] cramped display on the Mac's tiny 512 x
342 1-bit monochrome screen, the inability to control letter-spacing,
kerning,[8] and other typographic features, and discrepancies between
the screen display and printed output."

the reference does not support the claim.

in particular,

Because earlier versions of Pagemaker were known to less than
bug-free, we looked closely for bugs in Version 2.0, paying special
attention to earlier weak spots. Even after several weeks of testing,
we were not able to crash the program at all, regardless of how we
tried to trick Pagemaker with bizarre command sequences or by
loading corrupt files.
...
We mentioned above that Pagemaker 2.0 has been enhanced to
produce better output -- in fact, better than we've seen from any
other program. Pagemaker automatically regulates a combination of
kerning, letter-spacing, hyphenation, and justification to produce
pages that rival those from professional-level layout systems. (You
can also change the default settings of the features).


It doesn't sound as though the MacIntosh and Laserwriter had quite got
to an exact WYSIWYG.

actually, it does.

they tried hard to get it to crash and could not, with its output
rivaling pro level systems.

That was version 2.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens