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Re: Back-patting



 
>I think it would be great to hear of other
things being done with XyWrite,
>pedestrian or exotic. 

I have used XyWrite III+ and IV to produce
12 volumes of The South African Journal of
Economic History since 1987. This has
involved crunching well over a million words
in 144 articles, averaging 53694 words an
issue.

Not being shy about punting XyWrite, let me
quote from my article on the first decade of
the journal in Vol 11(1), March 1996 (there
is a copy available at:
http://home.intekom.com/joni/1ST-DEC.HTM):
"Apart from Vol 1(1), all the journals to
date have been produced using XyWrite which
even in 1996 remains the fastest and most
versatile DOS-based text editor available.
Not surprisingly its roots lie in the
newspaper world's mainframe Atex editing
system on which most South African
journalists cut their teeth in the early
1980s. On the PC front, however, the modern
trend towards semi-desktop publishing
Windows-based word processing packages is
definitely a step backwards as far as speed
and text manipulation is concerned. Fairly
sophisticated layout capabilities have been
traded for a drop-off in performance which
has to be compensated for by faster and more
expensive hardware. As a result the journal
is now edited using the no frills XyWrite 4
for DOS and then laid out in Ventura 5, a
Windows desktop publisher, so that the best
can be had from both environments." (After
one issue in Ventura I have dropped it and
gone back to plain vanilla Xy4 because
Ventura is rather buggy on footnotes)

I also use Xy4 to produce all my study
material for the two Economic History
courses I teach here at the University of
South Africa, which is one of the world's
biggest distance teaching universities with
over 120 000 students. My department as a
whole, unfortunately, left XyWrite for
WordPerfect 6 last year after being
pressurised by the University to conform to
their "standard". Until then, the
Department's 20 000+ students received
XyWrite prepared tutorial material. I
personally will NOT be conforming. The more
I use my recently installed Windoze 95, the
less I like it. I still, however, get great
pleasure helping a colleague out by
importing a document they are struggling
with in WP6, fixing it in a flash in Xy4,
and then exporting it back for them to carry
on making it look pretty in WP6.

I come from an Atex background on the
newspaper I worked for in the early 1980s. I
wrote my thesis on a Commodore CBM32 in Word
Pro 3+ in the mid-1980s - with all of 32K of
memory, I could only get two pages into a
document - no spell checkers and the like (I
subsequently converted it to XyWrite and
found three spelling mistakes!). My CBM32 is
now in the Cape Town Computer Museum (along
with the slide rule I used for Physics at
high school in the early 1970s).

My most useful XyWrite tool (apart from
those generated by Robert and Carl) is an
XPL routine that extracts footnotes so that
I can edit them separately and another that
puts them back when I have finished editing.
Most of the Economic History articles I edit
for the journal contain between 50 and 100
footnotes.

I am also the Economics Department's
webmaster and use Xy4 for all my HTML coding
(see
http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/ecn/index.html).
The HTML W4W converter from the Bulgarian
site mentioned previously in this news group
has been a great help.

As they say out here on the southern tip of
Africa: Viva! Viva XyWrite!

Regards
Jon Inggs