XyWrite development

[Myron Gochnauer GOCH@xxxxxxxx]

I sympathize with people who are frustrated with XyQuest/TTG.
I have watched the XyWrite user base in my Faculty dwindle from
about 15 down to 2. (XyWrite IV went unused for over a year
because it could not use the internal scalable fonts in an
IBM 4029 printer!)

I own Ami Pro 3, WordPerfect 6.1 and Word for Windows 2, and from
time to time I am tempted to give up on XyWrite.
But every time I come flying back to XyWrite when I need to get
some serious writing done. Everything else seems bloated,
inefficient and, well, arrogant in insisting on its own way of
doing things. And those gosh-awful bloated files of WP!! XyWrite
files are *so* easily read by virtually *any* competent editor,
and it is *so* easy to make changes in a XyWrite file that
everything else I have tried is frustrating beyond words.

*BUT*... WP 6.1 seems to be much more accessible to many of my
colleagues. They accomplish much more polished looking work with
it, and without as many panicky phone calls to me.

So what is XyWrite's reason for being? I agree with many of you:
speed and adaptability. The former is somewhat less of a factor
these days, but is still important psychologically.
A half second here and a half second there gives the user a sense
sleekness or bloat, energy or sloth.

Adaptability is the most important factor.

No other word processor, including the amazing but unsuccessful
Sprint gives you greater control over the keyboard. What other
program would allow me to convert F3 into another control key?
What other programs give you access to changing Alt-Crtl-Shft and
the unshifted keys?

Until recently (with XW 4.012) we could rewrite the help files as
well as everything else, including menus, dialogue files and
printer files. And we could do it all with ordinary editing
functions in XyWrite. Personally,
I think it was a mistake to insulate the user from the raw help
file in XW. (We are, aren't we???) I appreciate the power of
invoking the Windows help system, but couldn't we at least have
some kind of utility which would `compile' an ASCII help file into the necessary
Windows binary file???? I would like to write a personal help
file for LaTeX 2e.

For the power user who are *not* inclined toward programming
(and there *are* some of us), it would be a definite selling
point to automate more of the customization features. The
"Preferences/Default" menus are often quite convenient when
I can't remember a default code. Why not automate keyboard
changes as well? (I have heavily modified my own keyboard, but I
know people who have used XyWrite for 10 years without knowing
how to change a single key.

There are only two functions I would suggest as serious
improvements to XyWrite for writing projects:

1) Allowing the *same* open copy of a file to appear in different
windows, so the user could edit several different places in the
file merely by changing windows. Word does this, as does Sprint.
It is *extremely* helpful in the final stages of rewriting.

2) Allowing a project (session) to have access to more than nine
files. Sprint allows access to use to 24 files although only 9
windows can be open. The others are loaded/switched as necessary.
This is rarely necessary, but it certainly is nice.

Well, maybe a third, too:

It beats me why Ibid. has to be so expensive and problematic. I
would think that TTG could create a built-in (or nearly so)
bibliographic database function with relatively little effort.
A vast number of scientific writers are using BibTeX which has a
very simple data file structure (ASCII, too). Here are a couple
examples modified from a sample BibTeX database:

@INBOOK{inbook-full,
  author = "Knuth, Donald",
  title = "Fundamental Algorithms",
  volume = 1,
  series = "The Art of Computer Programming",
  publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
  address = "Reading, Massachusetts",
  edition = "Second",
  month = "10~" # jan,
  year = 1973,
  type = "Section",
  chapter = "1.2",
  pages = "10--119",
  note = "This is a full INBOOK entry",
}

@ARTICLE{article-full,
  author = "Lamport, Leslie A.",
  title = "The Gnats and Gnus Document Preparation System",
  journal = "G-Animal's Journal",
  year = 1986,
  volume = 41,
  number = 7,
  pages = "73+",
  month = jul,
  note = "This is a full ARTICLE entry",
}

It seems to me it would be fairly simple to write one of more
(ASCII) "filters" to format a footnote in ChicagoA style, for
example, and then have XyWrite respond to a code such as
{FN1{BIBsample.db,ChicagoA}[Lamport:1986]} by opening sample.db,
finding author=Lamport & year=1986, formating the information
according to the ChicagoA style and either placing it in the file
or the printer output. Why not? And why not choose the BibTeX
file format, which is already widely used in the sciences, or
something very easily converted to and from it????!

Myron ?.LBRV/2  .LBLG/MYRON
.LBCD/07CB0606 ?"?~|~?