WYSIWYG

Categories: Cleanup from October 2005 | Human-computer interaction | Acronyms | Computing acronyms

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.

Meaning

• A description of a user interface that allows the user to view the end result while the document or graphic character is being created.

  For example, a user can view on screen how a document will look when it is printed to paper.

• Also refers to the ability of modifying the layout of a document without having to either type and/or remember names of layout commands.
• Also refers to describe specifically a web-page creation program in which the user creates the webpage visually, while the program generates the HTML. This allows the users the freedom to optionally edit HTML if desired.

Programs may deliberately deviate from a WYSIWYG because of overhead or the users preference to type in the commands like Troff, Nroff and Latex.

Is WYSIWYG really useful?

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.

WYSIWYG in miniature wargaming

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.

Related acronyms

As with variations on the smiley, creating variations on the acronym WYSIWYG is something of a game. Many variations are used only to illustrate a point or make a joke, and have very limited real use. Some that have been proposed include, in order of increasing obscurity:

WYSIWIS

What You See Is What I See (used in context of distant multi-users applications, e.g. CSCW)

WYSIWYAF

What You See Is What You Asked For (in reference to programs such as those used for manual typesetting such as TeX or troff, that what is retrieved from the system is what the user specified - in essence, a statement of GIGO)

WYSIAYG

What You See Is All You Get (used by computer programmers who point out that a style of "heading" that refers to a specification of "Helvetica 15 bold" provides more useful information than a style of "Helvetica 15 bold" every time a heading is used)

WYSIAWYG

What You See Is Almost What You Get (most text editing programs)

WYSIWYM

What You See Is What You Mean (You see what best conveys the message)

WYSIMOLWYG

What You See Is More Or Less What You Get (another way of stating WYSIAWYG)

WYGINS

What You Get Is No Surprise - Weaker version of WYSIAWYG and WYSIMOLWYG

WYTYSIWYTYG

What You Think You See Is What You Think You Get ("whit-iss-ee-whit-ig") (when a program claims to be WYSIWYG but isn't)

WYCIWYG

What You Cache is What You Get ("wyciwyg://" turns up occasionally in the address bar of Gecko-based Web browsers like Mozilla Firefox when the browser is retrieving cached information) -or - What You Create Is What You Get -or- What You Click Is What You Get

WYPIWYF

What You Print is What You Fax, briefly popular in the early days of fax modems, to distinguish software that presented the fax modem to the OS via a printer driver and thus fax-enabled any program capable of printing

WYGIWYG

What You Get Is What You Get (an alternative approach to document formatting using markup languages, e.g. HTML, to define content and trusting the layout software to make it pretty enough)

WYGIWYGAINUC

What You Get Is What You're Given And It's No Use Complaining

YAFIYGI

You Asked For It, You Got It

WYSYHYG

What You See You Hope You Get ("wizzy - hig") (a term ridiculing text mode word processing software in the Microsoft Windows Video Collection, a video distributed around 1991 on two VHS cassettes at promotional events).

External links

• ATPM.com's WYSIWYG: Is it What You Want?
• What has WYSIWYG done to us? - Critical paper about the negative effects the introduction of WYSIWYG has had.
• XML: WYSIWYG to WYSIWYM - A brief look at XML document authoring An article on existing XML authoring software (May 2005)
• WYSIWYG Hebrew wysiwyg analysis
• Explanation of WYSIAYG with links to explantations YAFIYGI and WYSIWYGca:WYSIWYG

cs:WYSIWYG da:WYSIWYG de:WYSIWYG es:WYSIWYG fr:WYSIWYG ko:위지위그 it:WYSIWYG he:WYSIWYG hu:WYSIWYG nl:WYSIWYG ja:WYSIWYG no:WYSIWYG pl:WYSIWYG pt:WYSIWYG sk:WYSIWYG sl:WYSIWYG fi:WYSIWYG sv:WYSIWYG tr:WYSIWYG zh:所見即所得