If I see a gap between two lines of text, and that gap vanishes when I commit the document to the web or save it to a file, then it’s not ‘WYSIWYG’. But this has been my experience with 100% of such editors.

I propose a new acronym to replace ‘wizzy-wig’:

WYSMBWYGIYLBIACWBFRTWNBMCTYSSIYUC

What You See Might Be What You Get if You’re Lucky but it Almost Certainly Won’t Be For Reasons That Will Never Be Made Clear to You So Suck it Ya Ugly Cunt

Not as pithy, but at least it’s accurate.

  • JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca
    4·
    5 days ago

    Personally I feel like they’re generally pretty good at WYSIWYG. What they’re bad at is WYSIWYW (What You See Is What You Want).

    After I do a bunch of work in Word and I have a bunch of garbage, when I load that file back I still have the same garbage. If I print it, I get the same garbage. So yeah, I get what I see.

    Is that what I want? No, I want not-garbage.

    Anyone remember WordPerfect coming out with “reveal codes” and allowing you to basically edit the markup and fix the issues?

      • egrets@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 days ago

        It certainly has been marketed as one, but regardless, it is one. The commenter you’ve replied to isn’t saying otherwise, they’re saying it’s difficult to achieve the desired outcome.

        • Agent641@lemmy.world
          1·
          4 days ago

          Fuck me, 3.2mb program size, 1mb RAM to run it.

          How in God’s name is word now about 1000 times that size and needs 400 times more RAM?

        • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
          02·
          4 days ago

          Wow congratulations for dusting off the 36 year old marketing material! I’m not sure features in software respect 36 year statutes of limitation though. I suspect it no longer lives up to this claim. At least in my experience it doesn’t, unless you count only in print preview but not in actual editing.

          • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
            1·
            4 days ago

            I don’t believe Word ever claimed to be WYSIWYG.

            Key word: ever

            It’s always been a WYSIWYG - hell, one could argue it popularized the term.

            • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
              01·
              4 days ago

              Fair enough they got me on the semantics of my statement. I still don’t believe the functionality is still there though.

          • egrets@lemmy.world
            1·
            4 days ago

            Hah, just a quick search for the image, but the point is that your average word processor is WYSIWYG – so much so that the phrase has fallen out of fashion, because any other concept (e.g. a TeX client like LaTeX) is foreign to your typical user. You edit the formatted document directly, and it’ll always look the same on screen and print as it did at the point of edit.

            Granted you can enable alternate views in MS Word, like draft layout or web layout, but they’re not the default.

            • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
              0·
              4 days ago

              Everyone else here is getting the same page layout from Word in print that they see on the screen!?! Honestly more surprised than anything. I don’t remember it ever happening.

              • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
                1·
                4 days ago

                With default settings, I do. Every document I remember. The only difference is semitransparent header and footer in the GUI. Maybe you’ve enabled the fullscreen/reader view that usually breaks everything, or it’s default on web or mobile.

                I achieved high proficiency with Office 2013 and honestly, it’s not fully WYSIWYG, you have to do things like toggle field codes for some advanced stuff but 99.9 % of work done by Word users is in WYSIWYG mode. As for what-you-see-is-what-you-want? Well, hard no.

    • yyyesss?@lemmy.world
      0·
      4 days ago

      Macromedia. They ran the Internet for a hot minute.

      Shockwave, Flash, Dreamweaver, Coldfusion. My how things change.

  • blackbeans@lemmy.zip
    2·
    5 days ago

    It sounds like you are only talking about html.

    Delphi VB6 C# Winforms Qt

    These wysiwyg editors usually worked/work without issues.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    PDF is the only format I know of that is truly WYSIWYG, as it’s intended for print output. But, even with that, you need to know what you’re doing, it’s possible to fuck it up.

    • iglou@programming.dev
      1·
      4 days ago

      Eeeeh, no. PDFs will show differently based on the software as soon as it gets a little complex. The only truly reliable PDFs are PDFs that contain… Images.

    • Test_Tickles@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 days ago

      I wouldn’t go as far as to call PDF a dumpster fire, but I can tell you that internally it is an absolute unholy mess internally. The fact that you feel like you get consistency out of it 100% comes down to the anal retentive developers who spend insane man hours tweaking the fuck out of their code to get whatever PDF library that they got stuck using from fucking up the image.
      The worst part is that Adobe wants PDF to be the one and only format, but also wants to make sure that you have to use their very expensive PDF library to integrate it into your program. So, they constantly fuck with stuff and make changes that break shit. To make it even dumber, their own library doesn’t always keep up with their changes, and when you report the bugs they created, they give no fucks about ever fixing the issue unless you are big enough to for them to care.