Re: Wikipedia entry on XyWrite

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

> Although the faster speed may have become irrelevant with faster CPU's,
No matter how fast your CPU is, MSW will be too slow. Microsoft has
been promising the OpenType community, of which it is co-sponsor,
full support of OT in all its apps, since 1997. That's ELEVEN years
ago. It still isn't there. The developers won't support it because it
would slow down the program too much. (These issues were solved with
great speed and economy of memory by Apple with GX in the mid-90s - -
but . . . . . for a wide variety of reasons GX didn't take off.)
(It's for similar reasons -- MS pressure - - that Adobe gave up its
wonderful Multiple Master technology.)
I looked back in my Signature review and discovered that one of the
things I liked when trying to explain Sig to the general public was
that 'reveal codes' were _editable_. Thus you were far more likely to
make a discreet change (line leading from 1.1 to 1.2 for example) if
you could make it in a second with Signature by switching to expanded
mode and just editing the embedded command) than you were likely to
with MSW or WP because the endless menu navigation wasn't worth your time.
> My favorite XY feature is the ability to select a column of text and
> move the whole column to a new location.
As far as I know, XyW is still the only PC program that will let you
arbitrarily select a non-delimited column of text -- _what_ a handy
feature that can be! Not quite sure how to describe this feature,
but it's a scorcher!
Did we ever get "indent from this point onward" in XyWrite? I don't
think so. Quark has it (I think it's control-return?); I don't think
WP and MSW have it even now; of course Atex had it - - it was the IM
command if I recollect (yes, and IX). That was tremendously handy,
because you didn't have to specify the number of inches. The indent
would start at the precise point in the text stream where the IM
command was encountered.