WYSIWYG WTH

About 20 years ago there was a new guy in town, and his name was WYSIWYG. It was the buzzword of the times and often semantically confused with Syzygy, Fuzzy Wuzzy logic and all things Polish. It was cool to have it somewhere in the cloudy nebulous regions of our subconscious but nobody really cared what it did or even what it was. WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and pronounced "wiz-ee-wig".

In Wikipedia it says that WYSIWYG acts in 3 different modes :
"Composition Mode - in which the user sees something somewhat similar to the end result, but with additional information useful while composing.
Layout Mode- in which the user sees something very similar to the end result, but with some additional information useful in ensuring that elements are properly aligned and spaced, such as margin lines.
Preview mode- in which the application attempts to present a representation that is as close to the final result as possible."

You get the picture, or not. Without WYSIWIG, your resignation to your boss would actually have to be composed something like this;
And that's about "Dear Sir". By the time you've finished your resignation minus our WYS, you are likely to go out, buy a Remington and deck the halls with your version of Shotgun Annie.
Actually the above picture is of Mark-Up Language, commonly used by HTMLers(can't call em coders), but you get the Zeitgeist of the thing...persnickety fussy typing, massive numbers of colons, and a shaky "print" command. In fact the ubiquitous nature of the dreaded Font hadn't raised its ugly head yet, people didn't understand what a font did, because computers only used a simple text only display 40 characters wide and 24 tall. Now we have Turkish Genocide, Nasalization, Dingbat, a cornucopia of totally useless fonts we can flourish at any given moment. We have colour, we have margins, bullet points. Its origins are simple-Charles Simonyi was hired by Xerox PARC. He and Lampson developed Bravo, the first WYSIWYG document preparation program. And then he promptly went to work at Microsoft and in the begining there was Word. Simonyi made 1 Billion US$ off this ridiculous software, and we have been paying ever since.

Now you could actually format a composition and have a pretty good facsimile at the end. However, WYSIWYG has had a few things called at it, and for some very good reasons, one of them being WYGIWYG -What You Get Is What You Get or WYGIWYWNG (pronounced "whining")- What You Get Is Not What You Want. The reason is quite simple;

1. The resolution of your printer is far superior to the resolution of your monitor. 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. This means that everything will gain definition and contrast once you print it, whether you like it or not. Your stylized fonts will look like wrought iron toothpicks, and that lovely lens blur filter pass that you just applied will look like a muddy view of the nearest pawn shop window with gnarly hands sticking out of it. ALWAYS OVERCOMPENSATE.

2. Lets talk about colour shall we. Its the one thing that sends my print-out bills skyrocketing. For one, saturation, hue and contrast need to be calibrated and if you are an Apple Follower then you'll be happy to know that the Mac comes with its own calibration system. However the catch here is, you are calibrating based on your own eye. I know you can tell y'self "wth..I used my bloody eyes to compose this damn thing". Well sorry pal, thats just not good enough..your final print colours are still likely to come out desaturated, and with a loss of detail. What you need, if you are actually printing professional grade stuff, is a colorimeter. In its heyday it was a bulky apparatus resembling R2D2, now it comes in a rather less appealing but very functional form known as a SPYDER. You stick it in front of your monitor and allow it to do its creepy cal liberation, and you are done. This PCMAG Article is a little old so don't be too burned over the price. You can now get a Spyder2Express for $79. After a host of colour tragedies and disappointments you'll find that this little baby keeps the money in the bag.

As for WYSIWYG, oh its still around, infact it is mandatory for almost every practical output that comes offscreen, we just refer to it as wysiwyg, if at all, after all its had a rather quiet decade.