Re: A Win95 question

[Carlo Caballero ccaball@xxxxxxxx]

I am puzzled by Mr Minutillo's message. Why does he find the subscribers
to this list a "hostile audience." Hostile to whom? To what? I've only
subscribed here for a couple of months, and I think the list is one of the
most efficient and amicable forums I've found on line. It's also
practical.

I don't think it's necessary to do more than assert that XyWrite is an
excellent word-processor that does much more than edit text. What it
DOESN'T do IS relevant to marketing and popularity, but Mr Minutillo seems
to imagine that the seriousness many subscribers here bring to writing an
editing implies a lack of sensitivity to forms of presentation. For my
part, I love typography, and I still use XyWrite everyday. I have found
ways to expand the repertory of fonts XyWrite invokes. When I produced my
dissertation, I tried to make it as attractive as possible. I do the same
for any substantial document, and XyWrite takes me pretty far down the
road. On the other hand, I don't expect my word-processor to do
kerning, and I don't expect it to be a complete desktop publisher. As a
rule, I hand my copy to publishers, so perhaps that's why I'm content to
leave many matters of design to them.

There's a good book called COMPUTERS AND TYPOGRAPHY, edited by Rosemary
Sassoon. I think it came out in 1995. One of the most important things I
learned from it is that good typography has a lot to do with the simplest
elements of the page, especially spacing (which XyWrite happens to handle
very well). A lot of people with far better and more recent equipment
than I, and with four hundred more fonts, produce more or less illegible
text because they don't know how to SEE a page. No number of fonts can
fix that problem.

Carlo Caballero