RE: #3 in Guardian Tech today, bare metal editors over Microsoft Word

[Daniel Say say@xxxxxxxx]

 >Thanks for this link, Daniel. "Winning the war on Word" alliterates
>nicely, but sounds wildly wishful to me. Word certainly still dominates
>the legal world, in which I operate. Electronic filing has become close
>to universal in federal and state courts, and in that sphere the PDF
>reigns supreme, but when the document being filed is to be edited by
>the court (for example, a proposed order), a growing number of judges
>require the document to be in a word-processing format -- and the
>format they want is no longer WordPerfect, it's Word. And things like
>draft agreements fly back and forth by email, again always in Word. For
>myself, I'm happy enough to use Word to churn out workaday stuff, but
>when deeper thought is required, Xy4 running in a clean, borderless
>vDosPlus window is still king. I can't help feeling a bit smug when I
>see writers casting around for a way to rebel against Microsoft,
>knowing as we do that the solution (or a range of allied solutions)
>never left the building. I love Ernie Smith's concept of "bare metal
>writing", and Xy-DOS certain fits the bill.

  >>   #3 on the Guardian Tech section today. We're winning the war
  >> on Word, fellow writers. Enjoy the freedom by Jason Wilson "It may
  >> once have been synonymous with writing, but itb^Ys time to seek the
  >> uncorrupted writing experience elsewhere" The Guardian Sun 28 Oct
  >> 2018 13.00 GMT
>
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/29/were-winning-the-war-on-word-fellow-writers-enjoy-the-freedom

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx

Daniel Say  Sun, 28 Oct 2018 13:39:46 -0700:
>> Doesn't mention Xywrite, but text based editors in general

Dear Carl, and Xywriters

      So that's the reason for so many changes to Xywrite's
      "The Jumbo XyWWWeb.U2 File" pages for a PDF editor.
      http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/changelog.pdf
    
      I would think that the law system would welcome simple
      plain text with a few attributes by HTML

      Word files are bloated and need a special non-plain-text
      viewer/editor to view.
      And so much hidden inside as Tony Blair's office found
      in released documents in the Iraq War justification.
      See the Chilcot Report and
      https://office-watch.com/2003/hidden-change-log-in-your-documents/

      Oh, and the Ulysses program that the Guardian article
      by Jason Wilson above, is a writing App for Mac, iPad
      and iPhone and not the PC, yet.

      Robert Sawyer and George R.R. Martin depend on the text
      only WordStar and are noted on the great DOS-text-on-
      modern-Windows program VdosPlus.org
===========

   I have been playing around with Anne-Wil Harzing's tool
   PublishOrPress that search Microsoft Academic or Google
   Scholar or Web of Science, etc.
   https://harzing.com/blog/2017/01/publish-or-perish-general-search-a-swiss-army-knife

   It acts a front end to a cumulative search sorted by
   Citation and ranked by Citation Rate of hits for author,
   title, sentence fragment, keyboard, Or search etc and
   produces a sorted report of the 1000 (if that many found),
   which you can further look at "Open original article in browser",
   "Lookup Citing Referenes in Browser", "Lookup Citing Articles in
   Publish or Perish".

   Of course I looked up Xywrite (also Xy Write which brought up
   only a couple of valid references in 310 articles), and found
   731 articles. But many were irrelevant, adverts for Papyrus 6.0
   and other side-mentions of 'saving' or 'reading' in XYWrite Format.

   One was interesting, a lament by Bill Ott for the loss of Xywrite
   at the publishing arm of the American Library Assoc. (ALA)
   The reference was to a Google Book scan, but I tried to see if
   Library Genesis had a copy and it did.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

   (And I find that Sci-hub is useful or so many things with
   a DOI or URL to an article or note.)
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Quote:
    XyWrite had muscles, to be sure, but you had to know where to
   look for them. Perhaps the most unfriendly piece of software
   ever written, XyWrite demanded that its users learn thousands of
   commands and execute them perfectly. There were no drop-down
   windows, no explanatory notes, no multiple-choice options. If
   you didnt learn the commands, you looked at a blank screen
   forever. Its no wonder why XyWrite failed in the home-computer
   marketplace, but for professional writers who had no choice but
   to learn the system, it could be a thing of beautynot of the
   warm, cuddly variety, mind you, but coldly efficient beauty
   (think of one of those Margaret Bourke White photos of giant
   generators or the innards of a steel mill).
   ....I also loved XyWrites error messages. Harking back to an
   era of stern taskmasters who refused to tolerate sloppiness,
   XyWrite had little sympathy for those who did it wrong. If you
   typed the wrong command, there would be no friendly offers to
   help. No, XyWrite laid it on the line: Bad Command. You did it
   wrong, and theres no use doing it again until you figure out
   how to do it right. My favorite XyWrite error message (borrowed
   from DOS) occurred when you tried to save or copy a file in a
   bogus manner. XyWrite didnt even bother telling youd done it
   wrong; it simply said, Access Denied. The message was clear:
   you dont know enough to do what youre doing; practice harder
   and try again. So refreshingly undemocratic!

Booklist, September 1, 2000 page 145-147
Ott, Bill.
The back page / Bill Ott ; with a foreword by Joyce Saricks.
 ( Collection of essays which originally appeared in the authors column in Booklist, a review
magazine.)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8389-0997-3 (alk. paper)
---
"Bill Ott worked in libraries in Washington State for nearly 10 years before coming to the
American Library Association's Booklist in 1980 as Adult Books Editor. He was promoted to Editor and
Publisher in 1988."


   Another reference was to page 12-13, of

*   Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the
Digital Age.
By Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova.
Duluth, Minnesota: Library Juice Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-936117-14-7 (acid-free paper)
1. Citation of electronic information resources--Evaluation.

   which was an interesting title and subject, to say the least,
   even if not directly about Xywrite.
   Yes, like a lot of incidental text, it was on Library Genesis,
   libgen.pw, libgen.io etc.

       "In the past the archivist knew the implement and
     material, from stick on wet clay to ink on paper; now,
     however, the implement of the computer over the past few
     decades in its various forms and reincarnations (desktop
     to iPhone) not only are incompatible with each other, but
     also with each new generation of software (from XyWrite to
     InCopy).

   Another find was Data Simplification by Jules J. Berman but
   peripheral to Xywrite, and using open sources mini-tools to
   massage texts.

   A number of Brazilian authors mentioned Xywrite recently as a
   cleaning tool of texts in
   "Interacting with Data to Create Journalistic Stories: A Systematic
   Review" / Daniele R. de Souza et al.
   in Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10904,
   Title: Human Interface and the Management of Information: Interaction,
   Visualization, and Analytics 20th International Conference, HIMI 2018
   Held as Part of HCI International 2018. Las Vegas, NV, USA, July 1520, 2018
   Proceedings, Part I

   Most reference were to shorter papers, contemporary reviews of
   XyWrite in the 1980s 190s.

   Best wishes to all in writing and texting and Clear Thoughts.

                      Daniel Say