What Is WYSIWYG?

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. It is commonly used for word processors, but has other applications, such as Web (HTML) authoring.

Meaning:

• The term describes a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document or image is being created. For example, a user can view on screen how a document will look when it is printed to paper or displayed in a Web browser.
• It implies the ability to modify the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.

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, which is the ability of the user to be able to visualise what he or she is doing.

In many situations, the subtle differences between what you see and what you get are unimportant. In fact, applications may offer multiple WYSIWYG modes with different levels of “realism,” including:

• A composition mode, in which the user sees something somewhat similar to the end result but with additional information useful while composing, such as section breaks and non-printing characters, and uses a layout that is more conducive to composing than to layout.
• A layout mode, in which the user sees something very similar to the end result but with some additional information useful in ensuring that elements are properly aligned and spaced, such as margin lines.
• A preview mode, in which the application attempts to present a representation that is as close to the final result as possible.

Applications may deliberately deviate or offer alternative composing layouts from a WYSIWYG because of overhead or the user’s preference to enter commands or code directly.

 Historical notes:

• Before the invention of WYSIWYG, all text and control characters appeared in the same typeface and style with little indication of layout (margins, spacing, etc.). Users were required to enter code tags to indicate that some text should be in boldface, italics, or a different typeface or size. These applications used an arbitrary markup language to define the tags. Because of its simplicity, this method remains popular for some basic text editing applications (such as Wikipedia).
• The phrase was originated by a newsletter published by Arlene and Jose Ramos, called WYSIWYG. It was created for the emerging Pre-Press industry going electronic in the late 1970s. After 3 years of publishing, the newsletter was sold to employees at the Stanford Research Institute in California. The first conference on the topic was organized by Jonathan Seybold and the first technology 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”, Flip Wilson’s drag persona from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in the late 60s and and then on The Flip Wilson Show, (1970–1974).
• 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.

See Also:

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 to 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)

WYSIWYM:

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

WYTYSIWYTYG:

What You Think You See Is What You Think You Get (/wɪtɪsiwɪtɪg/) (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)

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)

WYSYHYG:

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