I have maintained a NB license for the past couple years, but, if one uses it *infrequently* (such as to print the occasional document on contemporary printers, as I do) it remains a rather expensive solution, just for that. Ongoing changes to NB may have also pulled the rug out from under the ability to use your longstanding keyboard macros or xpl like the U2 library with it. (If that is incorrect, I hope to be enlightened on that score.)
The
Search function in 7 is pretty bad, if not the complete disaster that the "Search Pup" was in XP, until one disabled it. What I'd really like to discover is some alternate utility as good as the old FileFind (FF) from Norton 4.5, back in the DOS days. That could bring you up lists of files -- probably with optional use of wild cards -- *or* even specific text strings in a file, and in surprisingly fast searches.
One other thing of a display nature that you did not mention is the Aero (or is it "Metro" now ?), that became standard with 7. I can tell you that that "disappearing / reappearing
glass window" can be very disconcerting for some older, longtime Win users. It will suddenly overlay something else, or the (perhaps fullscreen) window you were working in will seem to disappear entirely, when your mouse pointer strays a bit. I've often been tempted to disable this "feature", but for certain reasons never got around to doing so.
Jordan
From: Bill Troop
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, March 8, 2014 6:03 AM
Subject: Re: Staying with XP after April 8 2014 (was Win 7 vs Win 8)
> Longer term, I'm hoping that
Nota Bene will be our salvation.
Is there any evidence that Nota Bene will ever support OpenType fully or
even Unicode fully? Will NotaBene modernize sufficiently to support fine
typography at even the level of Word?
There was a time when XyWrite/Nota Bene led the field on book
production/typesetting features. I often think it's a pity that it hasn't
continued to evolve in those directions.
. . .
Regarding XP to Win 7, I would say that the transition takes about an
hour. 7 is much easier to use, and really is easier on the eye. One thing
to note, however: while it is easily possible in XP to search for files
that have no extension - - something which some XyWriters, including me,
alas, have got into the bad habit of doing - - MS search facilities after
XP (Vista and onwards) do not have a mechanism for search-indexing files
without extension names, so some other form of file-search becomes
obligatory. That said, I am finding that there Win 8.1 may have finally
brought back some limited ability to index and quicly search for files
without extensions.