Re: Xy Manuals Online (Was undocumented define functions)

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

Otis Port writes:

>Nota Bene Associates Inc. . . . created NB, sold it to TTG, or maybe
>TTG's predecessor, then bought it back from TTG

Thanks for the elucidation, and the URL. I'd thought Nota Bene was first
published by a company called Dragonfly, nominally (incompetently)
distributed across much of the world by Oxford University Press, and then
swallowed by TTG. Thus when I finally got on to TTG's website I was
surprised to see no mention of Nota Bene--which is only infinitesimally
less mention than XyWrite gets there (a button that leads nowhere).

I guess my mistake was not having got on this mailing list a couple of
years back. Now that I am here, and know how to read old messages--thanks
to N. Sivin's efforts and patience--I can start to assemble the jigsaw.

Always happy to presume upon the generosity and efforts of others--as when
I suggest that TTG should give XyWrite away--I wish there were a XyWrite
FAQ. Certainly I've got lots of questions that aren't pressing or the
slightest bit topical, and that I'm sure have been answered somewhere in
the archives (which I lack the stomach to wade through). For example, who
did most of the work writing XyWrite, and where are they now? Was XyQuest
unable to extract a large wodge of money from IBM to compensate for (what
seemed to me, a mere user, as) IBM's massive time-wasting? Did anyone
outside the computer press get his or her paws on pre-IBM XyWrite 4, and if
so, was it any good? Was it only us in Tokyo who instantly dubbed the
unusable product in the IBM box "Pigmanure"? Who was the surprisingly
realistic-looking writer used briefly in ads for XyWrite?

Such tattle aside, I do have worries that threaten to become pressing,
notably: what are format conversion routines that are of some use on
heavily formatted text? (XyWrite's own export functions are rapid and
uncomplaining, but the target program, such as WordPerfect, tends to find
the results indigestible. Meanwhile, WordPerfect's way of importing a Xy
file seems to be to ignore virtually everything that's not ASCII.)