Hyphenation bug XyWrite 4.017

[E J Inggs INGGSEJ@xxxxxxxx]

This is the fourth attempt to send this message to the list over the
post few weeks - here's hoping...

I have a major problem with at least 3 bugs. To cut a long story
short, here is a copy of my last (needless to say unanswered and par
for the course) correspondence with TTG dated 9 Feb 1996:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dear Mr Duval
(or whoever handles technical problems at TTG these days)

I am pleased to report my XyWrite 4.017 upgrade arrived on Monday (6
months after it was ordered and paid for). At the same time my copy
of IBID arrived almost 3 years after it was ordered and paid for in
April 1993!

Both are up and running BUT I am afraid NONE of my problems have been
solved by the upgrade.

To recap:

1. PREVIOUS PROBLEMS
  =================

1.1 Unsolved
   -------------

1.1.1 Hyphenation
   +++++++++++
I tested Version 4.017's hyphenation using the DICT.HYP exception
dictionary. Again I have found that words are not always hyphenated
according to DICT.HYP's list of exceptions (I get exactly the same
results with XyWrite for Windows). For the test I installed XyWrite
4.017 from scratch using the US English dictionary (instead of my
usual British English dictionary) and I stripped out all the hyphens
in the exception dictionary and used the SHOHYP command which
resulted in a different set of hyphenations compared to the
exceptions dictionary and XyWrite 3+. For example:

Exception     XyWindows/
Dictionary    XyWrite 4     XyWrite 3+
----------    -----------    -----------
gen-tle-man    gent-leman    gen-tle-man
gen-tle      gentle      gen-tle

In the hyphenation defaults my settings are: USA soft hyphen
character, smallest word 6, minimum before 2 and minimum after 2.

As in the past, if I want XyWrite 4 to hyphenate properly, I am
forced to run the IBM Signature dictionary. This, however, slows
XyWrite down to a snail's pace which is totally unacceptable.


1.1.2 Indexing
   ++++++++
Previously, Version 4.015 supposedly fixed a problem with indexing I
complained about in Version 4.014 to a Mr Coll at TTG in early 1994.
I am afraid the problem still remains in both 4.016 and 4.017.

When I use the CORRECT,, command to add an index marker to all
the words I want to index, in many cases the  marker still winds
up inside another formatter (eg >) which negates its
indexing capability. The problems is particularly bad in footnotes
which I use a lot of in my journal (up to 200 in an article).


1.1.3 ORBIS
   +++++
As with XyWrite 4.015, I cannot install ORBIS with Version 4.016 and
now 4.017. Thus I can only run ORBIS by loading XyWrite 4.014 which
was supplied as an upgrade with ORBIS in 1993. The ORBIS patched
copy of EDITOR.EXE simply hangs.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Subsequently I have been playing the XyWrite supplied exceptions
dictionary (DICT.HYP) and have discovered that a lot of it would have
to be rewritten to accommodate the XyWrite 4 bug which cannot handle
permutations of the same word in the list (as in my example above:
gen-tle and gen-tle-man).

Does anyone have a solution to any of the above problems?

Jon Inggs