Xy4 Dos Bugs

[charles.herold@xxxxxxxx (Charles Herold)]

The problem with Xy4 over Xy III+ is not entirely one of bugs. In some
cases specific changes were made, for whatever reason, that make the
product inferior:

1) The fix-spell function (ES) no longer returns the cursor to the
location at which the function is called, but simply puts it on the next
word, which I find very annoying. I've written an elaborate bit of XPL
to work around this, but using my version I have to skip over the query
about making a word all caps or keeping it the same or whatnot when I
choose an automatic replacement for a mispelling.

2) When printing, XyWrite IV responds to any printer error by aborting.
Thus if my printer runs out of paper at page 80 of a document, it will
abort the print job and I will have to set the page range and continue.

2.1) Speaking of setting the page range, I have found what appear to be
actual bugs with that. First, it doesn't seem to work at all if you are
printing out pages in reverse order. Second, setting the page range to
pages 1-3 will print out pages 1-6! It always doubles the number.

3) Xy III+ had a nice little routine for setting tabs in the help file
(the help file in III+ was vastly superior to IV's), while in IV there
is the more awkward approach of simply typing out the series of numbers
for tab stops.

Much of the problem with IV, then, was bad programming decisions that
made the product more cumbersome, rather than actual bugs (although I'm
still always coming across new quirks in IV).

Charles Herold