Bravo a document preparation program for the Alto produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974 is generally considered the first program to incorporate WYSIWYG technology displaying text with formatting (e.g. with justification fonts and proportional spacing of characters). 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 a new measure of 72 "PostScript points" per inch. Prior to this the standard measure of 72.27 points per inch was used in typeface design graphic design typesetting and printing.) Bravo was never released commercially but the software was eventually included in the Xerox Star can be seen as a direct descendant of it.4 In parallel with but independent of the work at Xerox PARC Hewlett Packard developed and released in late 1978 the first commercial WYSIWYG software application for producing overhead slides or what today are called presentation graphics. The first release named BRUNO (after an HP sales training puppet) ran on the HP 1000 minicomputer taking advantage of HP's first bitmapped computer terminal the HP 2640. BRUNO was then ported to the HP-3000 and re-released as "HP Draw". In the 1970s and early 1980s most popular home computers lacked the sophisticated graphics capabilities necessary to display WYSIWYG documents meaning that such applications were usually confined to limited-purpose high-end workstations (such as the IBM Displaywriter System) that were too expensive for the general public to afford. Towards the mid 1980s however things began to change. Improving technology allowed the production of cheaper bitmapped displays and WYSIWYG software started to appear for more popular computers including LisaWrite for the Apple Lisa released in 1983 and MacWrite for the Apple Macintosh released in 1984. The Apple Macintosh system was originally designed so that the screen resolution and the resolution of the ImageWriter dot-matrix printers sold by Apple were easily scaled: 72 PPI for the screen and 144 DPI for the printers. Thus the scale and dimensions of the on-screen display in programs such as MacWrite and MacPaint were easily translated to the printed outputif the paper were held up to the screen the printed image would be the same size as the on screen image but at a higher resolution. As the ImageWriter was the only model of printer physically compatible with the Macintosh printer port this created an effective closed system. Later when Macs using external displays became available the resolution was fixed to the size of the screen to achieve 72dpi. These resolutions often differed from the VGA-standard resolutions common in the PC world at the time. Thus while a Macintosh 14" monitor had the same 640x480 resolution as a PC a 16" screen would be fixed at 832x624 rather than the 800x600 resolution used by PCs. With the introduction of third-party dot-matrix printers as well as laser printers and multisync monitors resolutions deviated from even multiples of the screen resolution making true WYSIWYG harder to achieve. Etymology The phrase was coined by Larry Sinclair an engineer at Triple I (Information International) to express the idea that what the user sees on the screen is what the user gets on the printer while using the "Page Layout System" a pre-press typesetting system first shown at ANPS in Las Vegas.when The phrase was popularised 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 three years of publishing the newsletter was sold to employees at the Stanford Research Institute in California. Jon Seybold and 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 then on The Flip Wilson Show (19701974).56 Problems of implementation This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2008) Because designers of WYSIWYG applications typically have to account for a variety of different output devices each of which has different capabilities there are a number of problems that must be solved in each implementation. These can be seen as tradeoffs between multiple design goals and hence applications that use different solutions may be suitable for different purposes. Typically the design goals of a WYSIWYG application may include the following: Provide high-quality printed output on a particular printer Provide high-quality printed output on a variety of printers Provide high-quality on-screen output Allow the user to visualize what the document will look like when printed It is not usually possible to achieve all of these goals at once. The major problem to be overcome is that of varying output resolution. As of 2007 monitors typically have a resolution of between 92 and 125 pixels per inch. Printers generally have resolutions between 240 and 1440 pixels per inch; in some printers the horizontal resolution is different from the vertical. This becomes a problem when trying to lay out text; because older output technologies require the spacing between characters to be a whole number of pixels rounding errors will cause the same text to require different amounts of space in different resolutions. Solutions to this include the following: Always laying out the text using a resolution higher than the user is likely to use in practice. This can result in poor quality output for lower resolution devices (although techniques such as anti-aliasing may help mitigate this) but provides a fixed layout allowing easy user visualisation. This is the method used by Adobe Acrobat. Laying out the text at the resolution of the printer on which the document will be printed. This can result in low quality on-screen output and the layout may sometimes change if the document is printed on a different printer (although this problem occurs less frequently with higher resolution printers as rounding errors are smaller). This is the method used by Microsoft Word. Laying out the text at the resolution of a specific printer (in most cases the default one) on which the document will be printed using the same font information and kerning. The character positions and number of characters in a line are exactly similar to the printed document. Laying out the text at the resolution for the output device to which it will be sent. This often results in changes in layout between the on-screen display and printed output so is rarely used. It is common in web page designing tools that claim to be WYSIWYG however. Other problems that have been faced in the past include differences in the fonts used by the printer and the on-screen display (largely solved by the use of downloadable font technologies like TrueType) and differences in color profiles between devices (mostly solved by printer drivers with good color model conversion software). Related acronyms 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 the following: WYSIMOLWYG What You See Is More Or Less What You Get recognizing that most WYSIWYG implementations are imperfect. 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. This is also what Doug Engelbart prefers to call WYSIWYG since he feels it limits possibilities by modeling what can be done on paper.7 WYSIWYM What You See Is What You Mean (The user sees what best conveys the message.) WYCIWYG What You Cache is What You Get. "wyciwyg://" turns up occasionally in the address bar of Gecko-based Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox when the browser is retrieving cached information. Unauthorized access to wyciwyg:// documents was fixed by Mozilla in Firefox version 2.0.0.5.8 WYSYHYG What You See You Hope You Get (/wzih/) 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. WYSIWYS What You See Is What You Sign an important requirement for digital signature software. It means that the software has to be able to show the user the content without any hidden content before the user signs it. WYSIWYW What You See Is What You Want used to describe GNU TeXmacs editing platform.9 The abbreviation clarifies that unlike in WYSIWYG editors the user is able to customize WYSIWYW platforms to partly act as manual typesetting programs such as TeX or troff. YAFIYGI You Asked For It You Got It used to describe a text-command oriented document editing system that does not include WYSIWYG in reference to the fact that users of such systems often ask for something they did not really want. It is considered to be the opposite of WYSIWYG.10 The phrase was first used in this context in 1983 in the essay Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal to describe the TECO text editor system and began to be abbreviated circa 1993.1112 See also List of HTML editors Comparison of HTML editors Does exactly what it says on the tin Notes & references Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved November 09 2007 from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wysiwyg "Oxford English Dictionary: WYSIWYG". Oxford University Press. http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/mengb0963250.  Chamberlin Donald D. (September 1987). "Document convergence in an interactive formatting system". IBM Journal of Research and Development 31 (1): 59. http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/311/ibmrd3101F.pdf. Retrieved 2008-05-06.  Brad A. Myers. A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology. ACM interactions. Vol. 5 no. 2 March 1998. pp. 44-54. Hiltzik Michael (1999). Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. HarperBusiness. p. 200. ISBN 0-88730-891-0.  Lohr Steve (2001). Go To. Basic Books. p. 128. ISBN 0465042260. http://books.google.com/idXfPLVx6qScC&pgPA128&dqGeraldine+Jones+What+You+See+Is+What+You+Get+intitle:Go+intitle:To#vonepage&qGeraldine%20Jones%20What%20You%20See%20Is%20What%20You%20Get%20intitle%3AGo%20intitle%3ATo&ffalse.  http://www.invisiblerevolution.net Invisible Revolution MFSA 2007-24 Unauthorized access to wyciwyg:// documents Welcome to GNU TeXmacs (FSF GNU project) Raymond Eric S. (1996). The New Hacker's dictionary (3rd ed.). MIT Press. p. 497. ISBN 0262680920. http://books.google.com/idg80P4v4QbIC&pgPA497&dqYAFIYGI+%22opposite+of%22#vonepage&qYAFIYGI%20%22opposite%20of%22&ffalse.  Eric S. Raymond (ed). "The Jargon File 4.4.7: YAFIYGI". http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/Y/YAFIYGI.html.  "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal". http://www.pbm.com/lindahl/real.programmers.html.  (originally published in Datamation vol 29 no. 7 July 1983) External links The Jargon File entry for WYSIWYG What has WYSIWYG done to us - Critical paper about the negative effects the introduction of WYSIWYG has had as of 1996. XML: WYSIWYG to WYSIWYM - A brief look at XML document authoring An article on existing XML authoring software (May 2005) ATPM.com's WYSIWYG: Is it What You Want