Re: 12000 lines?

[Eric Van Tassel 101233.342@xxxxxxxx]

Daniel Say's reply still doesn't answer the important question: is this a
fixed (finished) text, or is it still being revised (such that line endings
may or will change in response to word-wrap) -- a "dynamic" text, in
Holmgren's elegant phrase?

As I see it, if the text is locked up, you just
(1) globally convert  to [{C0}] (where { } =
chevrons/guillemets, [ ] = any convenient pair of markers that don't also
appear in the text), and
(2) run any program to convert {C0} to hard numbers.*

If the text is still dynamic but you need *interim* line numbers, do a
PRINTS[creen]** to produce REVIEW.TMP, then perform routines (1)-(2) on
REVIEW.TMP.

* I've written an XPL routine for this job, but I assume xywweb has a
better one.

** Presumably the file will have been endowed with all the formatting
instructions necessary to produce line-ends where you want them.

I used to do this in Xy3 before I gave it up forever (the thing that turned
me around was the availability of wildcards on both sides of a change
argument), so I can confirm that the procedure described works just as well
in Xy3. Was the xywweb solution to this problem predicated on Xy4, and is
this why it didn't meet Say's needs?

Does this help at all?