Apple created the first mass-market WYSIWYG word processor. For those of you who do not remember that acronym, it means “What You See Is What You Get”. All word processors up to 1984 were text processors with embedded formatting commands. I can’t recall the specifics, but here is what the user would work with with such a word processor:
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Apple “Pages” Word Processor
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Apple created the first mass market <italic>WYSIWYG</italic> word processor. For those of you who do not remember that acronym, it means “What You See Is What You Get”. All word processors up to 1984 were text processors with embedded formatting commands. I can’t recall the specifics, but here is what the user would work with with such a word processor:
This might remind you of HTML, and in fact HTML was based on the early word processors. But these word processors were difficult to use because you couldn’t verify that the page would come out the way you intended. Apple’s WYSIWYG word processor was “MacWrite” and it was a beautiful program: powerful and easy to learn. It forced Microsoft to copy it with their word processor “Word”.
Over the years MacWrite went through many changes, and the current version, which represents a complete redesign and rewrite of the software, is “Pages”.
Now, WYSIWYG word processors have been with us for 33 years now, and the basic feature set is pretty well settled. There haven’t been many substantial changes in the way they operate for at least 15 years. By this time, word processors should be old hat, something that’s so simple and easy that it should be impossible for a software team to screw up a word processor.
The gentle folks at Apple appear to have accomplished this with Pages.
Actually, my complaint is almost trivial, but it is most irritating and simply should not show up in mature software. It’s an outright bug, but it’s difficult to describe without a number of huge screenshots.