Re: XyWrite Demo on eBay

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

wbass@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> In my view, that book explained what was really simple and easy to
> explain, and much that people would have guessed anyway, in great and
> way-too-tedious detail. But when it came to anything difficult to explain,
> it didn't explain it at all. An amazing case of form over function, IMO.
What I respectfully suggest Wally is overlooking is that most
end-users (even, alas, XyWriters) take the line, "What's the
least I need to know to use this thing?" Anything you needed to
know to create, format, save, merge, or rename a file, cut and
paste between more than one, print, generate a table of contents,
and almost anything else one would need to do _ when writing or
editing a document_ was in there, and logically arranged. (That's
perhaps the biggest benefit. Most SW manuals are monuments of
illogic when it comew to organization--when there were SW manuals.)
Now, of course, the wonderful thing about Xy is that besides all
those basic things you can do things no other WP can do--like
wildcard searches (esp. involving numbers). And all the hacks (in
the best sense) Carl and Robert have come up with, and the
ability of all end users, if they put their minds to it and
really need a routine, to write their own. But people won't even
dream of trying that if they cannot write a paper, save it, print
it, merge it into another file, etc. And learn to do that
quickly, and be able to find out how to do something they haven't
done before, because it's right there, in its logical place, in
the manual.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx