Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Does WYSIWYG exist at all in any Mac program?

I remember many, many years ago something called WYSIWYG was being bandied about regarding the Mac. My understanding was that the term what you see is what you get meant that the type on the screen was identical to the type you get on paper when you printed a text document: font size, font style, line breaks, margins.

I've found this not to be the case for a very long time. I'm referring to type size for the most part right now, though if you want to comment on other aspects go ahead.

I've printed text from Firefox, Safari, Text-edit, Tex-Edit Plus, NeoOffice, Mail, and ical, perhaps even others. I don't recall ever seeing a printout that mimicked what was onscreen. In fact, one program's print seems to differ from another's.

I always to have change the font size in the text document before printing to get a more readable or likable copy. I don't know until the page prints. I've wasted a page. Sometimes I change the font because some fonts look better on page versus the screen and at different sizes: Verdana 10, 11, 12, 13 onscreen versus their print versions. Verdana 10 and Verdana 12 print versions. Quite different.

Web sites are even worse, of course they use their own fonts, that's obvious, but I also wind up speculating about the size, how readable the copy is. I don't know what I'm going to get until I do a test print. I've tried to use the PrintEdit extension in Firefox to compensate for variables.

I thought, too, that various preview functions, such as in Preview, were supposed to compensate for variables and therefore show you before you print what you are actually going to get. I'm not sure that's true anymore.

Maybe you noticed this or maybe I'm wrong. What do you think? It is a remarkably glaring, annoying drawback when I want to print text. WYSIWYG used to be a prized feature for doing desktop publishing on the Mac.

Currently using Epson Workforce All-in-One Workforce 630 inkjet.

The Web has never been WYSIWYG. Different browsers have rendered the same HTML and CSS differently, and likely always will.

Also, moving from the Web to print is always going to have problems. The Web works in pixels on a computer screen, and there's no such thing as a set size for a pixel on a computer screen. How big is a 700-pixel-wide image? An image that is 700 pixels wide will stretch a bit more than two-thirds of the way across a computer screen that's set to 1024x768, and a bit less than halfway across a monitor that is set to 1440x900, but how big is that? It will be different sizes on a 19" monitor and a 22" monitor if they're set to the same resolution. Should it go a third of the way across a printed page? Halfway across? How big should it be?

I haven't printed from anywhere near as many programs as you have, but I'll echo your complaint about what prints not being the same as what you see on screen.

I have found, though (OS X 10.6.8), that docs are accurately portrayed when viewed as pdfs in Preview (and I've saved loads of paper as a result).

For the most part, that's true but I have found some exceptions. In printing a dental claim form from Delta Dental, for example, part of the lower section is lost when printing from Preview but the whole page prints in PDFpen . Sheet music downloaded from Petrucci Music Library behaves similarly but mostly with the right and left margins being incorrect. Since I like to have room for punching holes (so that I can put the pages in a looseleaf binder), I always print that music from PDFpen. PDFpen leaves enough room at the sides for those holes.

It seems to me that Tacit's comments offer the reasons for the differences. In the old days—1984 and the following years—when Apple controlled the size of your monitor, mostly because there was only one size, the size of the one built into the computer (e.g., Mac SE), there was "true WYSIWYG".

But of course in those days there were primarily dot matrix printers and no color to speak of, so perhaps we were more tolerant and forgiving, having been lulled into a sense of wonderment and awe as a result of the amazing things we were even seeing on the screen.

There is no question that some typefaces that look good on the screen, are not so good on the printed page. In fact the Lucida typeface was specifically designed in an effort to have the same level of readability on the screen and the printed page.
IMHO they did a pretty good job of it but it is impossible to be 100% for several reasons:

• When seen on the screen you are seeing transmitted light that comes from behind the screen, through the text and to your eyes. Printed material is reflected light and is therefore perceived differently. Years ago when I was in technical training we learned very quickly that the most readable typeface for printed materials was often a poor choice for transparencies.
• Type on the screen is generally scaled differently than the print version. In applications such as NeoOffice, Pages, Word, etc. it helps to set th zoom level to 100% rather than, "fit to the page" or a fixed percentage up or down from 100%. That way you closer to seeing the same thing.
• Another lesson from my training days is the printed page may look differently from one computer to another due to the version of the font. Modern proportional spaced fonts are surprisingly complex and each character has its own unique width. That width can vary from one implementation of the font to another. That can and will effect pagination, line length, and character spacing. Add to that the fact that the selected font may not be available on the other computer so a "similar" font will be chosen.
• Another lesson from my training days, If at all possible use PDF when sending carefully formatted files to another computer. PDF is essentially an image and the font(s) used are embedded in the PDF file so there is no reliance on fonts on the other machine.
• The printer can effect the appearance as well. In Windows computers the printer can have a major impact, but not so much with Apple. With Apple, printing to a PDF or Postscript printer should be accurate since the screen image is a PDF too.
• On the subject of PDFs, Jon's comment about Preview and some documents or parts thereof not printing is because Apple Preview comprehends only the Open Source set of PDF and not the proprietary Adobe subset. The comment that PDFPen handles those files correctly is interesting. (Maybe I can get rid of Adobe Reader and use PDFPen instead.)

By-the-way, when I was in training we never found a better way of determining what typeface to use for screen display, printed materials, transparencies, or Keynote presentations other than print them out on the appropriate media. Eventually we developed a standard based on the intended media and created all the various materials using the desired output font. Today I use Lucida for pretty much everything, except web pages, unless I need a specialty font for a specific effect.

Another by-the-way, typeface choice and selection for various purposes is the subject of numerous books, college courses, and even graduate degree programs. There is a series of excellent books on the subject of fonts for use in various media written by Robin Williams (no it is not THAT Robin Williams).