RE: Mastersoft Filters Resurface

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Olson, Timothy wrote:

> Going to Adobe's Web site, I found the following (for some reason dated
> earlier than the PCMag article): "March 11, 1997: ADOBE FILE UTILITIES IS
> CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDERING. INSO Corp has recently bought the
> package from Adobe and are in the process of re-packing it and releasing
> it under a new name." That name, apparently, was VaporWare. Inso never
> released a file-conversion utility. They already had QuickView 4.0 at the
> time.

Yes, and an inquiry to Inso around that time showed that Inso had no
intention to release updated versions of the AFU or WFW programs as
such. My assumption is that they have cannibalized them for improvements
to viewer-only Quickview Plus (something like what ttg has done with
xyw?). Maybe Tim Baehr knows more. (BTW, Nathan Sivin's praise for QVP's
versatility is deserved; the new v.5.5 does the best job yet in
displaying files of all sorts of formats, even rendering linked graphics
in HTML files, if you also downloaded those additional files.)

However, before Adobe sold the File Utilities 1.0 to Inso, the WFW that
was included shows as v. 7.12, and it does list XyWrite III, XyWrite
III+. XyWrite IV, and XyWrite IV for Windows on both the Source and the
Target sides. The actual filters were not the last word--the ones
someone here told us about on the Hungarian ftp site are slightly later.

Another conversion program, WordPort, has continued support for Xy4 and
Nota Bene formats. Those are the filters NB sells as "Morphos," and the
ones that will be included in the final NBWin, although I don't know if
they'll be in the shipment next week or so, or available at a later
date. I've never used those, but am told the WordPort conversions are
better than most.

Of course, no conversion program any of us has seen really converts
everything, and some are messier than others. WFW for example inserts a
vast amount of extraneous tags, mostly harmless but annoying, specifying
in agonizing detail the program's default settings if your source file
left those unstated. And Xy automatic numbering (especially for mildly
complex outlines) never seems to get handled very well. Some NB users
have written nice little XPL routines to "harden" counters before
putting a file in the grasp of other less talented programs.

	Dorothy

*****
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx	
*****
	"He also surfs who only sits and waits."