RE: Back-patting

["Daskin, Alan" Alan.Daskin@xxxxxxxx]

And you thought I was a Neanderthal holdout! (This is just one of many such
stories recently.)

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Jon Inggs [SMTP:INGGSEJ@xxxxxxxx]
	Sent:	Monday, October 19, 1998 3:41 AM
	To:	xywrite@xxxxxxxx
	Subject:	Re: Back-patting

	 
	>I think it would be great to hear of other
	things being done with XyWrite,
	>pedestrian or exotic. 

	I have used XyWrite III+ and IV to produce
	12 volumes of The South African Journal of
	Economic History since 1987. This has
	involved crunching well over a million words
	in 144 articles, averaging 53694 words an
	issue.

	Not being shy about punting XyWrite, let me
	quote from my article on the first decade of
	the journal in Vol 11(1), March 1996 (there
	is a copy available at:
	http://home.intekom.com/joni/1ST-DEC.HTM):
	"Apart from Vol 1(1), all the journals to
	date have been produced using XyWrite which
	even in 1996 remains the fastest and most
	versatile DOS-based text editor available.
	Not surprisingly its roots lie in the
	newspaper world's mainframe Atex editing
	system on which most South African
	journalists cut their teeth in the early
	1980s. On the PC front, however, the modern
	trend towards semi-desktop publishing
	Windows-based word processing packages is
	definitely a step backwards as far as speed
	and text manipulation is concerned. Fairly
	sophisticated layout capabilities have been
	traded for a drop-off in performance which
	has to be compensated for by faster and more
	expensive hardware. As a result the journal
	is now edited using the no frills XyWrite 4
	for DOS and then laid out in Ventura 5, a
	Windows desktop publisher, so that the best
	can be had from both environments." (After
	one issue in Ventura I have dropped it and
	gone back to plain vanilla Xy4 because
	Ventura is rather buggy on footnotes)

	I also use Xy4 to produce all my study
	material for the two Economic History
	courses I teach here at the University of
	South Africa, which is one of the world's
	biggest distance teaching universities with
	over 120 000 students. My department as a
	whole, unfortunately, left XyWrite for
	WordPerfect 6 last year after being
	pressurised by the University to conform to
	their "standard". Until then, the
	Department's 20 000+ students received
	XyWrite prepared tutorial material. I
	personally will NOT be conforming. The more
	I use my recently installed Windoze 95, the
	less I like it. I still, however, get great
	pleasure helping a colleague out by
	importing a document they are struggling
	with in WP6, fixing it in a flash in Xy4,
	and then exporting it back for them to carry
	on making it look pretty in WP6.

	I come from an Atex background on the
	newspaper I worked for in the early 1980s. I
	wrote my thesis on a Commodore CBM32 in Word
	Pro 3+ in the mid-1980s - with all of 32K of
	memory, I could only get two pages into a
	document - no spell checkers and the like (I
	subsequently converted it to XyWrite and
	found three spelling mistakes!). My CBM32 is
	now in the Cape Town Computer Museum (along
	with the slide rule I used for Physics at
	high school in the early 1970s).

	My most useful XyWrite tool (apart from
	those generated by Robert and Carl) is an
	XPL routine that extracts footnotes so that
	I can edit them separately and another that
	puts them back when I have finished editing.
	Most of the Economic History articles I edit
	for the journal contain between 50 and 100
	footnotes.

	I am also the Economics Department's
	webmaster and use Xy4 for all my HTML coding
	(see
	http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/ecn/index.html).
	The HTML W4W converter from the Bulgarian
	site mentioned previously in this news group
	has been a great help.

	As they say out here on the southern tip of
	Africa: Viva! Viva XyWrite!

	Regards
	Jon Inggs