Re: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Thank you, Jordan.

I'll let you know, if anything comes of this.

--Harry
Harry,
I'm someone who has been known to tilt at the odd windmill, when the cause
was worthy. So I may be inclined to contribute towards this also.


From: Harry Binswanger 
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2018 1:16 PM
Subject: Re: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

Kari Diabolus,

Greetings. Here is the other, other side.
1. It is way too late to do anything of the sort. The customer base which
still exists is too small (and dying one by one).
I will pay thousands of dollars to get this. I suspect others would pay a
considerable, if lesser amount. What matters it if our numbers are few and
dwindling? We aren't trying to please any set of people but ourselves.
2. We already have a product that is ported to the modern Windows
platform, albeit a singular one (Nota Bene).
I have tried NB with each iteration, without success. I don't know that
I've tried NB 3, which you have mentioned, but certainly most of them for
a long, long time. NB is indeed sufficiently XyWrite-like, but it is
terribly slow and non-robust. Versions later than NB 9 will not load U2. A
few years back, I wrote a post to this list on how NB would save us, but
despite much tinkering with each version and some real improvement by
means of that tinkering, I have always found NB unsatisfactory for
scripting work, which is most of what I use XyWrite for.

_________________________________________________________________________________________
I wrote a draft of a letter to Anne Putnam, but haven't sent it because I
need to check for some possible factual errors. In our office, we
regularly draw upon a huge library of legal documents that were written in
Xy 3+, and which are heavily and precisely formatted with Xy deltas. In
testing that at home, I have found NB to be a total non-starter. Attempts
to import any of these documents yields apparent gibberish, in a typesize
so tiny that you would need a microscope to read it. Given the lineage of
NB, I consider this is unacceptable deficiency. Wasn't NB supposed to
have better built-in import / conversion than the "Hungarian" filters of
old ? And I thought they had added even more, like PDF import / export,
though so far I'm not seeing evidence of that. (Or perhaps I just don't
know where to look ?) While we do have this external conversion program
-- an old version of WordPort, which is far from perfect but a lot better
than nothing -- that gets to be a cumbersome process.
I think that NB used to have a very similar problem importing Xy-4
documents, but that seems to have been addressed. Someone may have given
me a workaround procedure for NB and Xy-3 documents once, but
unfortunately I have no record of it. If most of the formatting gets lost
however, it would not be an appealing solution.
I was not aware of the U2 library situation with NB, but that would be
another strike. (Some years back, RH created an instructional video for
adapting NB so as to shed a lot of its UI trappings and reveal the inner
Xy. Is that a recipe you ever followed ? What with the NB code changes
to achieve 64-bit status etc., this may all have become invalid.) My
usage of NB is specific and rather limited.



  Jordan