Re: questions

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

Jim Besser:

See my message of a couple of weeks ago comparing XY and XW, now
archived and downloadable with last month's traffic. In reply to
your questions,

1. There are the minor differences in defaults noted there,
which can make for unrecognized deltas in XW files read in XY.
These are rare enough that I have not encountered the problem
yet.

2. In XW I am using the XY dictionary, fonts, and macros, and my
own templates and styles, by setting XWSTART.INT and XWSET.DFL to
load them from the XY directory. I use my old Nota Bene
hyphenation dictionary, since XW shares the greater flexibility of the latter and
XY does not. You can put in a root like flex-i-b* instead of
flexible*, flexibility*, etc. My keyboard is essentially my
highly customized XY4 keyboard, but slightly simplified because
the better command stack on XW makes it unnecessary to use an
ancillary one, as I had to do with XY, etc.

In sum, if you are already using most of the features of XY4, the
adaptation to XW is extremely easy. I still use XY a good bit of
the time, since, although I have no strong objection to the
Windows font used for draft and other non-WYSIWYG modes, I find
the simple Courier that comes with XY much easier on the eyes for
long periods of use. I could use a Windows Courier screen font,
but that would undoubtedly lead to other problems in Windows.

-- Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325