Re: xy as html (Cross post)

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

I agree: The EOF at the end of files created with XY has never done
anything I want, and it makes a good deal of trouble. To mention the
trouble I most frequently experience:

In reading email I save and concatenate all the messages I want to
download in one file, always with the same name so I can use macros on
it. When I have the file on my PC I then process it with a macro in
XyWrite to get rid of heading trash, and I format, print, save on
disk, delete, etc., one by one. Every so often, in one of these
concatenated files a number of messages are lost, because XY only
reads the file up to the EOF at the end of one of them. I am forced
immediately to abandon the file, call it up on the Norton Disk Editor,
search for the EOF, and get rid of it. That is a pain in the neck.
When I contact the sender to say something about the trouble that
EOF's cause, it turns out inevitably that he is creating his files in
XY. I keep a 1987 version of PC-WRITE especially for writing email,
since it loads instantly and produces files in immediately usable
form.

--
Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325
(nsivin@xxxxxxxx)