openoffice & xywrite?

[Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx]

  Been a few years since I've subscribed to this list! I essentially
gave up on xywrite (started with it back in '88, my very first word
processor) and switched to openoffice, which I really like, running it
in linux, of course. Anyway, the other day I got this epiphany of sorts.
I was thinking that my laptop battery would last much, much longer if
all I was doing was writing, and doing that in dos and xywrite. So, I
set up a small dos partition, freedos, and installed xywrite and my old
copy of multilex, the dos dictionary and thesaurus that pops up inside
of xywrite -- just like the old days.
  Even downloaded and installed the 4.18 upgrade that Robert and Carl
made available, plus their new U2 stuff. Kind of strange, playing with
all this after years away from it, but it is pretty nice to have a such
a quick boot, no worry about shutdowns, just turn it off -- much easier
to just write something on the spur of the moment.
  One serious problem, however -- how to get the files back and forth
between xywrite and openoffice? I had thought possibly saving them as
rtf files might work, but when I open those from openoffice in xy, they
sure are ugly. No way that will work. And I do recall that staroffice at
one point had some pretty decent xy filters -- but that must have fallen
by the wayside.
  So -- I've googled all day and searched the openoffice site and
forums extensively, but to no avail. Anybody here got any ideas? I can,
I guess, just save both as text files, but in long documents, I'm
probably going to end up with trashed formatting, etc, and have to do a
lot of work over again.
  I've also looked a bit at notabene's latest, downloaded the demo.
I'd almost buy it, if I had some assurance that they would get their act
together and add the opendocument (xml) file format. That's the future
for documents, obviously, even the National Archives is converting all
their files to it, so why put money into a dead end?


--
Harmon Seaver