A current interest is to develop and later to test the effectiveness of
an interchangeable batch-WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) picture
drawing program. Faina Shpilberg, one of Berry's M.Sc. students,
developed WD-PIC, which has a windowed, direct manipulation, WYSIWYG
interface not unlike MacDraw, XFIG, Adobe Illustrator, etc. There is a
pallet with buttons for a number of different shapes. In most such
programs, clicking on any of these and then clicking on two or more of
its points in the drawing field cause the requested shape to show up at
the specified points. WD-PIC has a batch language for expressing
pictures, i.e. the PIC language, as its ASCII internal representation.
Clicking on a shape button causes the PIC code for the shape to go into
the internal representation while the shape shows up on the drawing
field at the default size and position without the mouse having to
designate any points. The internal representation of a WD-PIC drawing
is thus an ASCII file that can be edited by an ordinary text editor.
The result is that any step in the production or changing of a drawing
can be done with the most convenient interface for the step. Building a
picture from scratch can be done in a direct-manipulation WYSIWYG way,
while global substitution of captions or addition of new items in the
middle of the picture can be done by editing the internal
representation. The research issues were the user interfaces, the
division of work between the batch and WYSIWYG approaches, and portable
construction of this software by using GUI tool kits and portions of
the code of the batch PIC program.

<p>
Shpilberg, Faina, ``WD-pic, a WYSIWYG, Direct-Manipulation pic,'' M.Sc.
Project, Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1997:
&nbsp;
<a href =
"https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/FTP_SITE/students.theses/shpilberg/"> FTP
</a>

<p>
Since Shpilberg finished her thesis, several others have tried to improve
on the work, including:

<p>a group of Technion students:
&nbsp;
<a href =
"https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/FTP_SITE/students.theses/technion.group/"> FTP
</a>

<p>and some groups of Waterloo students:
&nbsp;
<a href =
"https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/FTP_SITE/students.theses/cs740b.s99/"> FTP
</a>

<p>
Finally, Lihua Ou did a production quality version for her Master's thesis,
Ou, Lihua, ``WD-pic, a New Paradigm of Picture Drawing Programs and its
Development as a Case Study of the Use of its User's Manual as its
Specification'', Master's Thesis, School of Computer Science, University of
Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, 2002:
&nbsp;
<a href =
"https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/FTP_SITE/students.theses/lihua/"> FTP
</a>

<p>
All of this is together at the WD-PIC directory
&nbsp;
<a href =
"https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/FTP_SITE/software.distribution/wdpic/"> FTP
</a>

<p>
What remains to do is for someone to do a controlled experimental
evaluation of the effectiveness of WD-PIC's user interface as compared to
the traditional picture drawing software user interface, in what
is called a usability study. Any takers?