Styles (was Re: Xy Win/macros, etc.)

[Eric Van Tassel 101233.342@xxxxxxxx]

I brought Styles into the discussion for a couple of reasons.

(1) Though I've not saved all the postings, I recalled that one of them had
raised the problem of inserting a batch of formatting features
automatically. For years I did this under Rene's system, creating a bunch
of external format files and merging in the appropriate one where needed.
Russ has pointed out one drawback I knew about (you can't so easily
reformat a particular passage at will,) and Leslie Bialler has reported one
I didn't (the Quark connection: I've half-heartedly tried to make Styles
carry over into MSWord, but without success). But under Rene's system I had
to keep a list of format files posted on the wall, because I couldn't carry
them all in my head; with Styles I just hit Ctl+Shft+s and a menu appears.
 And the original poster (if my memory is correct) was trying to make
XyWrite easier for non-dedicated users. (I believe - though I may be wrong
- that MS Word has its own version of the Styles procedure, which I'm sure
is far more cumbersome and full of heffalump traps.))

(2) As for italic etc. within a style: I hadn't tested this recently, but
in response to Leslie's posting I've just tried it, and found a different
problem. When I added MD+BO to SSSUB (the definition of the Style I use for
a subheading), I *could* also use MD+IT...MD-IT for an italic phrase within
a subhead, without making the rest of the subhead (after the italic phrase)
non-bold. But I also found that when I added {MD+BO} to the SSSUB
definition, all subsequent copy (i.e. after USSUB had been superseded by a
different Style) still came out bold.
 However, I must have run into this problem before, for when I created the
Styles for my current project (short-book-length) I wrote a supplementary
macro that reads as follows (using { and } for guillemets), which I ran
when copyediting was completed:
  {SV01,{MD+BO}}{SV02,{MD-BO}}{LBrun}BC SE |{USSUB}|XC {IF{ER}}{EX}
  {EI}{GT01}BC SE |{US|XC CL CL CL {GT02}{GLRUN}
This inserts {MD+BO} immediately after the string that invokes Style SUB;
and it then inserts {MD-BO} just *before* the next Style (regardless of
what it is) that follows SUB.

If you wanted a particular Style to include bold - i.e., so that *all* copy
within that Style would always be bold - I *think* it could also be
achieved by adding {MD+BO} in the Style definition but incorporating {MDNM}
in every *other* Style in the document. Other mode commands within a
mono-Styled block (such as the book title in Leslie's example) would work
as normal, so long as they used Xy4's "additive" form (i.e.
{MD+IT}...{MD-IT} rather than {MDIT}...{MDNM}.
 (The additive-modes system was one of the things that delighted me when I
first switched from Xy3 to Xy4, and I now avoid {MDNM} like the plague -
which must be why I haven't tried my own suggestion and included {MDNM}
routinely in any new Style I create.)

And if you designed a particular Style to incorporate constant bold, or
constant italic, you'd have to reverse that feature negatively - e.g. if
SSSUB includes {MD+IT}, then a single roman word within a subhead would
have to be formatted
  {MD-IT}Anomaly{MD+IT}
(This is, of course, an exception to the principle mentioned earlier - that
it would take only a few keystrokes to change the format of an entire
passage. If I had such a subhead, including one non-italic word, and I
subsequently wanted to change that subhead to normal prose using a Style
that didn't include {MD+IT}, the word "Anomaly" wouldn't then magically
turn to roman. Duh ...)
 But the usual shortcut for single words/phrases does work here: if you're
inside Style SUB, which mandates bold, and you hit Ctl+B at the start of a
non-bold word and Ctl+B again at the end of that word, XyWrite reads your
mind (there's a slogan to conjure with) and inserts first {MD-BO} and then
{MD+BO}.

Incidentally, I also use a few formatting files of the kind Rene describes,
which I routinely invoke whenever I start a new document: as Leslie
suggests, they already contain some all-purpose styles (subhead, text,
indented quote, footnotes) as well as a default running header which
includes the filename, (variable) date & time, and page no.

The Styles procedure has one drawback that hasn't been mentioned. If you
move a chunk of copy from file A (which begins by defining a few Styles) to
file B (which doesn't have those particular Styles defined) XyWrite has a
small fit when it can't find the Style being invoked. But no procedure is
foolproof.

Cheers
Eric Van Tassel