An Overview of the W Document Preparation System

Summary

ABSTRACT

This paper describes both the use and the implementation of W, an interactive text formatter. In W, a document is interactively defined as a hierarchy of nested components. Such a hierarchy may be system- or user-defined. The hierarchy is used both by the W full-screen editor, and by the W formatting process, absolving the user from providing any layout commands as such. W manipulates text, such non-text items as mathematical formulae, and has provision for the inclusion of general graphical items.

Introduction

W is an interactive text-editor and document preparation facility being developed within the department of Computer Science at Manitoba. A working prototype of W, known as W-p, has been described elsewhere [King84]. W is a considerable development of that earlier system, but retains the same basic philosophy:

• W is an interactive, extensible, integrated editor and formatter;

• W adheres as closely as possible to the “what you see is what you get” (wysiwyg) philosophy;

• W encompasses a wide range of document items, incuding text, tables, mathematical formulae, and provision for general graphical items;

• W is portable and adaptable; that is, several versions of W are being produced to run on different architectures; although the user interface will differ in its detail, the underlying system will be common;

• W is user extensible in a variety of ways.

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes W from the user's viewpoint and gives some details of its implementation. For the most part, it is a review of material which is covered in greater depth in [King84].