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.
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?
Word was never good with layout. Move one picture or text block on a page for just a tenth of a mm, and it can easily fuck up the whole page layout.
Exactly. You never get what you want, but you certainly get whatever crap you see.
I don’t believe Word ever claimed to be WYSIWYG.
Oh, yes it did, from the start.
That was a major marketing point over WordPerfect.
Source: I supported the early versions of office.
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.
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?
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.
Key word: ever
It’s always been a WYSIWYG - hell, one could argue it popularized the term.
Fair enough they got me on the semantics of my statement. I still don’t believe the functionality is still there though.
And antivaxers believe that vaccines cause autism.
Believing something doesn’t make it true.
Lol the double-down is always funny.
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.
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.
Who said anything like that?
But also yes. If you’re viewing a Word doc in page view, it’s going to look the same when you print it.
That’s true for when you use it as well. Apparently your memory is terrible.
I must never use page view then
It sounds like you barely even know what Word is at this point.
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.
The one caveat is that documents made in the Word Desktop app can look different if opened in O365