Re: openoffice & xywrite?

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Harmon Seaver wrote:
>   One serious problem, however -- how to get the files back and forth
> between xywrite and openoffice? I had thought possibly saving them as
> rtf files might work, but when I open those from openoffice in xy, they
> sure are ugly.

Yes, well, ALL modern word processors bloat their documents
beyond belief with extraneous and redundant formatting. The fault
is not in Xy but in the other guys. What I do is work in Xy until
I'm absolutely, positively finished with the doc, remove ANT
unnecessary formatting, and use SA/RTF (one of the U2 routines; I
also convert to WordPerfect, since one of my clients works in that).

You could CAll the RTF doc in Xy and--IF you knew enough about
RTF and XML coding, which I don't--clean it up further there. I
seem to recall that someone here--Robert? Flash?--uses Xy to
directly encode HTML docs.
Robert's point about minimal formatting is well taken, BUT even
if you have NO formatting in the Xy file, the dratted conversion
filters stick in a whole lot of "default" formats. I've tested
this. Then too, if you're doing scholarly writing, you pretty
well have to have italics (for book and journal titles and
foreign words). Run something with itals through a conversion
filter and it doesn't just have the other program's equivalent of
≪MD+IT≫; it has five (at least) changes of font and size as well.
At least when you convert FROM the bloatware to Xy, you can clean
out the detritus with ad hoc or preprogrammed CIs.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx