Re: Command line macro for word

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from Paul Breeze  Tue, 19
Jun 2012 11:00:26 +0100

Paul:

> Some years ago Carl posted a wonderful command line macro for
> Wordperfect that mimiced many XY and NB commands. I am now
> being forced to use MS Word for part of my work and I wonder if
> anybody has attempted, or seen a similar macro for Word?

This has been on my to-do list for years; unfortunately, I'm not
going to get to it anytime soon. I'm not even sure it's feasible --
at least, not at the level of Xy-mimicry you can get with
WordPerfect. What makes XyWrite's command syntax readily portable to
WP is the fact that WP, like Xy, has a system of in-line formatting,
where commands take effect from the point in the document at which
they're embedded, and stay in effect until altered by a subsequent
command. So it's not too hard to map XyWrite commands onto WP
equivalents that behave similarly. Word formatting, in contrast, is
template-based; commands generally operate on the entire document,
or on a section of the document, or on selected text -- a very
different animal. I'm skeptical that any amount of scripting could
overcome that essential difference. I'd love to be proved wrong.

Although I haven't looked intensively, there's seems to be precious
little out there that even begins to fit the bill. A quick Google
search turned up this blog post from 2009, about using Applescript
to get a "primative" (sic) command-line interface for Word:

http://bit.ly/MuzaWj

and this mildly-interesting piece on harnessing Word's search syntax
to perform discrete (search-related) tasks:

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html

Neither comes close to the kind of command-driven interface that
XyWriters are used to.

If you find anything useful, please post about it here.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx