Xy doesn't break lines so well. First, hyphenation.
Jon Inggs writes (in a different thread):
>I have been editing and printing the South African Journal of
>Economic History with XyWrite3 & 4 since 1986 despite [the latter's]
>HYPHENATION BUG which nobody on this list seems to have encountered.
I do my hyphenation by hand: HY=0, and a sprinkling of tildes. Like other word processors I've seen, Xy is too eager to hyphenate. So instead I use my common sense and good [?] taste, reinforced by the *Oxford Minidictionary of Spelling*. This little book distinguishes between merely tolerable breaks (which I'll represent here as "!") and irreproachable ones (here, "|"). Here are some examples to give the idea: pre|dom!in|ate, pre|ju!di!ca|tion, pre!par!at|or!ily. Xy lets one limit hyphenation in certain ways, but I'd like the option of only hyphenating where to do so is completely natural ("morphophonemically A-OK"?). I could then add a few tildes for myself.
Secondly, dashes. An em-dash with no space before or after it should be freely detachable from its surroundings. As it is, I have to look for dashes in funny places and add spaces. Similarly, an en-dash should be detachable from what follows it, as should a slash. (There could be non-breaking dashes and slashes, too.)
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Spelling checks. Since Helios Software provides dictionaries in numerous languages for its shareware text editor *Textpad*, TTG should be able to come up with dictionaries in more languages than just North American. But as for North American, this should move with the times. I don't think it matters much if the dictionary is small (not including "tendentious", "xenophobic", etc. etc.)--it's easy to add to it, after all--but it's ludicrous for it not to include such terms as "Internet" and "shareware".
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Snaking columns. Can these be got to work? I tried hard a couple of times, a long time ago but with different versions of Xy. Both times everything looked fine--but there turned out to be at least one, fatal snag. I gave up with snaking columns.
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Tables. Do I misunderstand, or are these a pain in an orifice with XyWrite? I once made a rather pretty table with Xy3, but it took me more time than it would have to cut out little pieces of paper and paste them. Then I decided to make some changes and most of my good work was undone.
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Peter Evans