Describes a user interface under which What You See Is
All You Get
; an unhappy variant of
WYSIWYG. Visual,
‘point-and-shoot’-style interfaces tend to have easy initial
learning curves, but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced
users who would be better served by a command-style interface. When this
happens, the frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most
often used of editors, word processors, and document formatting programs.
WYSIWYG ‘desktop publishing’ programs, for example, are a clear
win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and graphics in them,
especially things like newsletters and presentation slides. When
typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale changes the
nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG limitations, and the
increased power and flexibility of a command-driven formatter like
TeX or Unix's troff becomes
not just desirable but a necessity. Compare
YAFIYGI.