Re: Lost Grid

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

"M.W. Poirier" wrote:

>  Perhaps it is because I've never needed to draw on GRID,
>  I have no idea what it is for or how to use it. However,
>  I have noticed it in my XYWrite directory. In fact, I
>  see that there are two file, GRID.TXT and plain GRID.
>  Briefly, what is it for?

I'm not sure exactly what it's for either, but it goes way back, perhaps to
Xy-3 or even earlier. I have always seen this file as GRID.FRM (form ? frame
?). Clearly, it was intended to let you devise some sort of Rows & Columns
layout in Xy, but this serves to illustrate just how clunky that task becomes
in a non-GUI, non-spreadsheet environment. (Arguably, we get a bit closer to
that goal in the Column Tables feature.) The other thing I vaguely recall this
being used for -- from way back in my brief employment in forms design -- was
to print it out on a clear acetate sheet, and to use it as an overlay to guage
certain things in the layout. However, we were making heavy use of precise
and miniscule PCL adjustments then, with a wide array of fonts, and the PCL
for the then current HP-II and HP-III Laserjets had 300 d.p.i. and therefore
possible increments of 1/300th. of an inch. In view of this, I'm afraid
GRID.FRM would have been a rather blunt instrument. Xy was quite capable of
incorporating / manipulating / printing blocks of raw PCL in or as a document,
including the # of copies desired.


Jordan