Editor / Formatter

[GOCH@xxxxxxxx]

Regarding the Goodbye XyWrite discussion...

Having been a XyWriter since 1983 I too have been saddened by
XyWrite's ongoing failure to find a secure market. And I too have
been tempted by other products --- I own (legally) WFW 2.0c,
AmiPro 3.0, WP 6.1 and Describe. They all have strengths and
weaknesses, and any one of them would be fine for any sane
person. But XyWrite was my first love, and over and over again
I find that only it provides the raw *editing* flexibility and
speed I want.

About a year ago I started using LaTeX as the formatting system
for my academic writing. It requires simple ASCII files, XyWrite's
"thing". The writer need only enter the appropriate logical or
structural codes --- \chapter{...}, \section{...}, \footnote{...},
\begin{enumerate}, \end{enumerate}, etc. --- and LaTeX worries
about how these will look. Since the formatter is separate from the
editor, XyWrite is free to do what it does best. This is, of course,
anything but WYSIWYG, but for me this is no problem at all for
most of my writing --- a book, articles, letters, lecture notes and
class handouts. In the past six months I used Amipro once to
print out a complicated diagram I designed a few years ago. WFW
has not been used at all (or upgraded, either). WordPerfect is used
only when I have to place something for my students on the law
school server --- at my school all students have access to WP.

My colleagues are amazed that I still use a "primitive" wordprocessor
like XyWrite (for DOS, no less). And yet, the rough drafts of my
book, articles and even class notes look far more polished than
anything they can manage with their longer, lower and wider,
turbo-charged WP's.

I can only hope that whatever TTG does with XyWrite, it does not
destroy Xy's excellence as an editor. But as one of you recently
observed, XyWrite 4.017 isn't going to wear out.

And one final comment:   Why can't we reconceptualize the entire
idea of a wordprocessor market? I, for one, would be happy to
"subscribe" to XyWrite at, say $50/75 a year, in exchange for at least
one update (even bug-fix) per year, a quarterly newsletter, a web
site and telephone support. How can we expect a small company to
survive when its major source of revenue must come from finding
*new* customers??? That means XyWrite must constantly struggle
against the giants while not being able to rely on the enlightened
(i.e. confirmed XyWriters). Why must we treat XyWrite like an
"object" rather than a "service" to which we subscribe or even an
"organization" or "society" to which we pay membership dues???

Myron