Document conversion

[Steve Hayes khanyaiis@xxxxxxxx]

On 15 Sep 00, at 17:36, jr_fox@xxxxxxxx wrote:

 > It depends what you need to do, conversion wise, but the set of conversion
> filters that came with XY-4 (from MasterSoft, long out of business, and
> based on their Word for Word suite), are generally of little use for other
> file formats (going to or from XY) circa versions later than the early
> 1990s. The only surviving competitor I know of is ACI, which puts out a
> conversion utility called WordPort. I have this. It is better than
> nothing, but generally less than satisfactory . . . at least in the tests
> I have run.

I've found it's easiest to save as Ascii and reformat. It's a nuisance when
one wants to preserve bold, italic and roman from the original, but the
conversions, even when they do work (I have Word for Word) almost invariably
put in too many codes - probably because none of the other word processors
have the simplicity and elegance of XyWrite.

For instance, most of them put in margin commands and indenting commands and
justification or no justification commands in every paragraph. None of them
seem to have simple commands like XyWrite's OF or IP.

And none of them does redlining as well as XyWrite. I now use Lotus Wordpro
because it does redlining of WordPerfect documents far better than
WordPerfect does, but XyWrite, in spite of being 13 years old, still does it
better.

But while the redlining converts OK between XyWrite and Wordperfect, none of
the converters seem to be able to handle italics.

We used to have our printers all set up so that if they could print italics
MDUL would print as italics. And if necessary, one could set up MDRV to print
as italics, and switch between them with a simple CHA /MDUL/MDRV/.

But WordPerfect would convert MDUL to underline, and there was (and is) no
simple way of changing all underlines to italics in WordPerfect.

I still use XyWrite because I'm to impatient to learn to do thing the hard
and long way when I already know the quick and easy one.


Keep well,

Steve Hayes
E-mail: shayes@xxxxxxxx
  Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/steve.htm