XyWrite to Word

["Thomas J Hawley" tjh@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Lisa Kleinholz  on Sat, 25 Mar
2006 17:23:23 -0800 (PST)

> This is something that annoys me every single time I use Word.

I know the feeling. It seems so obvious that you ought to be able to open and
save a new file in one operation. Has Microsoft determined that most / many
documents are created, printed, and never saved and therefore this approach is
easiest for most users most of the time? I'd like to think that someone in
Redmond has thought about it, but maybe not . . .

XyWrite offers a similar capability; you can use NE alone to open an [UNTITLED]
file and I do use that occasionally.

> And weird things happen in Word, even
> with the templates, that never happen in Xy.

I hear this constantly, even from experienced Word users who are pretty savvy.
There are only a couple of weird things that can happen in XyWrite (screen
display quirks in Page-Line mode; alignment of line numbers on printed output;
on rare occasions, text that appears on the screen and should be there does not
appear when the document is printed) and they're known bugs.

One thing I've noticed is that Word doesn't like text imported from XyWrite via
cut and paste; it seems to go OK and looks fine on the Word screen, but
suddenly your Word styles start behaving strangely. The workaround seems to be
to leave XyWrite's end of paragraph marker out of the selection. If you bring
them into Word, Word will recognize them for some purposes but not others.

(In Word, the end of paragraph marker holds the formatting for the paragraph
object to which it's attached, and the final end of paragraph marker in the
document holds, in addition, certain document and section object formatting.)

Tom Hawley
New York
tjh@xxxxxxxx