History; code

["Patricia M. Godfrey" pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Many thanks for the history piece. In one of the choicer ironies of
history, IBM had done to it by Microsoft exactly what it did to XyQuest
and others hapless enough to take up with a Very Big Company. That was in
the Pink-Taligent episode, when MS proposed a joint venture, IBM did a
whole lot of coding, and then MS pulled out at the last minute. Talk
about chickens coming home to roost!
	One reason for trying to get rights to the code is that without it, no
one _new_ will ever be able to acquire, install, and learn XyWrite
legally. The EULA says we cannot make copies except for "archival
purposes." So prospective users cannot buy it, and we cannot legally give
it to them.
	Aside to Leslie: do you still use XyWrite at CUP? What will you do if
you get a prospective copy editor who doesn't know but is willing to
learn XyWrite? Or does CUP already have a site license?	
	As for XyWrite as a copy editing tool, it's better than anything else,
but unfortunately, neither XyWrite or NotaBene as they now exist is
exactly what copy editors need. You can clean things up superbly, but you
cannot keep the "audit trail" of changes that book publishing (as opposed
to periodical publishing, where the editor pretty much has carte blanche
to do whatever is needed) requires. Redlining was devised by lawyers for
lawyers, and cannot hack it. And of course if your client wants the piece
back in another format, you're really out of luck. We have no completely
accurate conversion filters: Adobe--criminally--removed the ones for
XyWrite 4 when it bought out Word for Word, and there are serious bugs in
the WordPort ones. And they don't convert Use Styles. (That is really
unfortunate, since Styles, in any word processor, are a much more logical
way to format documents than the ad hoc changes that most people use
instead--not, perhaps, surprisingly, given how awkward and buggy styles
are in Word and WordImPerfect. Anyone ever try to use WP's auto numbers?)
Patricia M. Godfrey
P and Q Editorial Services