From the referenced document : > Known bug lists > 1. WYSIWYG I agree. The first bug is that it is WYSIWYG. ;-) Oh that's not what they meant. Or is it a cl

From the referenced document : > Known bug lists > 1. WYSIWYG I agree. The first bug is that it is WYSIWYG. ;-) Oh that's not what they meant. Or is it a clever innuendo ? /Joke ## Praise of WYSIWYM (WYM for "what you mean") Seriously, I wrote my Ph.D. as LaTeX source code with the help of LaTeX-mode in Emacs, including colored syntax highlighting, and was/am very happy. As explained in a number of places, the point is to write for content without diluting your brainpower with appearance issues. Moreover it is a common experience that proofreading a rendered copy allows the brain to more easily find typos without the filtering effect that cause one to miss them in a document being edited WYSIWYG fashion. Also, editing source code has the nice property that there is no hidden state. Ever been annoyed in Word or Google Docs by undesired formatting conflict on a copy-paste? (yes I know "paste as plain text") Also, bullet list with some bullets having mysteriously different appearance from their siblings and you can't fix it. With sane source document editing these issues cannot happen. ## What next That said, imagine a hybrid future from assertions below: * I now use asciidoc as it is simpler to edit (much simpler for things like tables), and have a toolchain that renders it to PDF via LaTeX (the xsl-fo path was never near as visually clean). I wrote a LaTeX style for my personal freelancing company (quotes, invoices, reports, technical documentation) and the fact that one cannot deviate from the style is a feature. * Side-by-side source+rendered editing somehow can make sense. * There is practical educational value to let newcomers benefit from LaTeX power and rendering quality with the WYSIWYG they still perceive as comfortable, some will migrate to source editing. * This project could spawn some variants with other rendering engines. * Did they solve all the problems with cursor positioning (see "text editing hates you" mentioned here on HN recently) ? In many cases, several visual positions correspond to same source position and vice versa. * What will happen in practice is the tech will be applied to some other places, which is the very point of public research. That reminds me the project Boomerang. https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/ https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/ there is probably some common ground between those projects.