Re: Pgm to increase point size

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

At 12:01 PM 4/1/97 -0500, Tim wrote:
>In a message dated 97-03-31 05:54:45 EST, Harry B. writes:
>
>≪ Is there any way you could document all this stuff?!! Seems like we peons
> are working with only half the power of Xy4. ≫
>
>I'd love to if: (1) I had the time; (2) I could be sure what *wasn't*
>documented. I suspect that a lot of this stuff is in the manuals somewhere,
>but I also admit that we were developing new commands on the fly as we needed
>them, sometimes right up to ship date. Problem is, sometimes I don't know
>what I know until somebody asks!

Aha, Plato's theory: knowledge as reminiscence. ;)
>
>Aside: I don't know who did the original docs for III+; I do know the woman
>who headed up the doc effort for Signature/Xy4/XyW. She is a skilled,
>intelligent woman who was asked to do too much with too few resources on a
>too-tight schedule. I've seen, read, and even indexed lots of other
>documentation (Lotus, Symantec, etc.), and XY4 isn't as bad as some.
>
You said it. I'll NEVER forget the first pages of my first computer
documentation: the CP/M manual from digital research. This was when my ideas
about computers were as cloudy as a 9-year-old's ideas about sex. The manual
began (from memory): "File names can be either ambiguous ("afn") or
unambiguous ("ufn")." Naturally, I didn't know that there were things called
"files" much less that they had names.

But I'd being willing to pay you for a simple list of all the commands,
functions, and values that you know. Or how about this: I'll go through
Xy4.dlg and extract and sort all the commands and values, eliminate the
familiar ones, then email them to you and you write a short description next
to each. How's that sound and maybe if several of us throw in $20 each we
could get you $100-$200 for the job. Just throwing around ballpark numbers here.

Regards,
Harry

Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx