Xydos - Xywin - Ansi

[Guido Milanese MC1194@xxxxxxxx]

To: XYWRITE@xxxxxxxx

Subject:    XyWin - XyDos
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My little contribution to this very interesting discussion. I am not a XyDos
user, but a loyal NotaBene user. However, I bought
XyWin (the offer was very interesting) basically because, having a lot of
editing work to do for a journal, I decided that
I had to learn a Windows WP (we have W***P******, but I detest it, as well as
W***). Very nice WP indeed: XYWin is fast, has most of the advantages of a Dos
product and most of the advantages of a Win product. There is a problem. I
discovered that some chars do not display or print correctly. I posted a
message a fortnight ago, and some members of this list (particularly Leslie
Bialler: thanks!) explained that XyWrite for Windows uses ASCII characters, not
ANSI characters. For a Win product this is a _real_ weakness and a serious
shortcoming, because this implies (as I discovered, alas!, with several fonts
used by linguists) that texts written in another Windows (= Ansi) WP cannot be
completely imported.
The filters provided with Xy cannot do the job for a simple reason: some Ansi
chars do not have an equivalent in the Ascii table, and so they are lost in the
conversion process. I tried also to import the file through a RTF step (i.e.:
from W*** to
RTF and then to XY) but the situation does not change, for the reason explained
above. Note that in the RTF file produced by
W*** each character has its own and clear code, but XY cannot
'see' them. These chars are simply deleted.
    I think this is likely to be a very serious limitation also for the
future. Multilingual WP is now a reality, and Ansi is still the standard (at
least now: Unicode looks now more a desire for the future than a reality).

    My twopence...
    gm

---------------------------
Guido Milanese
Universita' Cattolica      Internet: mc1194@xxxxxxxx
Ist. di Filologia Classica     smail: Largo Gemelli 1
+39.2.72342-750  Fax -740        I-20123 Milano MI