WYSIWYM

WYSIWYM ( /ˈwɪziwɪm/) is an acronym for What You See Is What You Mean, and refers to a paradigm for document editing. It is an alternative to the better-known WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) paradigm, which displays the document on screen as it will be printed.

In a WYSIWYM editor, the user writes the contents in a structured way, marking the content according to its meaning, its significance in the document, instead of designing its appearance. For example, in a WYSIWYM document the user might mark text as the title of the document, the name of a section, or the name of an author. This requires the structure of the document (contents semantics) to be known before editing it. The editor also needs a system for exporting the edited text to generate the final format of the document, following the indicated structure.

The main advantage of this system is the total separation of presentation and content: users can concentrate their efforts on structuring and writing the document, rather than concerning themselves with the appearance of the document, which is left to the export system. Another advantage is that the same content can more easily be exported in different formats.