In late 1978, in parallel with but independent of the work at Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard developed and released the first commercial WYSIWYG software application for producing overhead slides (or what today are referred to as presentation graphics). As a result, one would occasionally find characters and words that are slightly off-a problem that would continue up to this day.īravo was released commercially, and the software eventually included in the Xerox Star can be seen as a direct descendant of it. When the text was laid out on the screen, 72 PPI font metric files were used, but when printed, 300 PPI files were used. The Alto monitor (72 PPI, based on the typographic unit) was designed so that one full page of text could be seen and then printed on the first laser printers. with justification, fonts, and proportional spacing of characters). When the tags are made visible in the editor, however, they occupy space in the unformatted text, and as a result can disrupt the desired layout and flow.īravo, a document preparation program for the Alto produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974, is generally considered to be the first program to incorporate the WYSIWYG technology, displaying text with formatting (e.g. The use of markup tags and codes remains popular today in some applications due to their ability to store complex formatting information. Each program had its own special way to format a document, and it was a difficult and time-consuming process to change from one word processor to another. These applications typically used an arbitrary markup language to define the codes/tags. In this environment there was very little distinction between text editors and word processors.

Users were required to enter special non-printing control codes (now referred to as markup code tags) to indicate that some text should be in boldface, italics, or a different typeface or size.

Before the adoption of WYSIWYG techniques, text appeared in editors using the system standard typeface and style with little indication of layout ( margins, spacing, etc.).

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