WYSIWYG Introduction
WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzy-wig” or “wuzzy-wig”) is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and is used in computing to describe a system in which edited content appears exactly the same as the final product. It is commonly used for word processors, but has other applications, such as web (HTML) authoring.
In many situations these subtle differences between what you see and what you get are unimportant.
Modern software does a fairly good job of optimising the screen display for a particular type of output. For example, a Word Processor is optimised for output to a typical printer. The software often emulates the resolution of the printer in order to get as close as possible to WYSIWYG. However, that is not the main attraction of WYSIWYG but the ability of the user to be able to visualise what they are doing. This is particularly true with those users who do not have extensive artistic backgrounds.
Games Workshop and other makers of Miniature wargaming enforce the WYSIWYG rule in official tournaments. For instance, a figure of a Space Marine with a Plasma Gun must always represent itself as such; it cannot represent a Marine with a Flamer or anything else. This means that if the Marine player wanted to have a Flamer instead of the Plasma for the next battle, he is obliged to acquire, assemble, and paint up a new Marine carrying that weapon. The WYSIWYG rule is to prevent confusion since an opponent need not worry about second guessing what threat the Plasma Gun Marine would represent. This makes collecting a miniature army costly - and profitable for the vendor. Even for Games Workshop developers, when fighting battles for the Battle Report section of White Dwarf, their armies have often been limited by the availability of painted miniatures from the studio army…
Historical notes
- The phrase was originated by Jonathan Seybold and popularized at Xerox PARC during the late 1970s when the first WYSIWYG editor, Bravo was created on the Alto. The Alto monitor (72 pixels per inch) was designed so that one full page of text could be seen and then printed on the first laser printers. When the text was laid out on the screen 72 PPI font metric files were used, but when printed 300 PPI files were used — thus one would occasionally find characters and words slightly off, a problem that continues to this day. (72 PPI came from the standard of 72 “points” per inch used in the commercial printing industry.)
- Seybold and the researchers at PARC were simply reappropriating a popular catch phrase of the time originated by “Geraldine”, a character on The Flip Wilson Show, (1970-1974). In addition to “What you see is what you get!” This character also popularized “The Devil made me do it!”
- The Apple Macintosh system was originally designed so that the screen resolution and the resolution of the dot-matrix printers sold by Apple were easily scaled: 72 PPI for the screen and 144 DPI for the printers. Thus, the on-screen output of programs such as MacWrite and MacPaint were easily translated to the printer output and allowed WYSIWYG editing. With the introduction of laser printers, resolutions deviated from even multiples of the screen resolution, making WYSIWYG harder to achieve.
- Charles Simonyi, the PARC researcher responsible for Bravo, joined Microsoft in 1981 to start development of application programs at Microsoft. Hence, Bravo can be seen as the direct ancestor of Microsoft Word.