RE: Xy to Word

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

Thanks to everybody who gave me a solution to my problem. Sorry I can't use
them all. 

>Nancy said:

>I recently produced a 40,000-word ms. in XyDOS
>4.017, opened it in Word, and had to manually replace every (")--which Word
>recognizes as an inch mark--and change every (--) to an em dash. If there's
>an easier method, I'd love to hear about it.

At 11:35 AM 8/2/01 EDT, Tim Baehr  wrote:

>In Word 7.0, I go to Format - Autoformat (or similar; I don't have it on
the machine I'm using right now). Autoformat is settable. In its default
form, it's likely to really mess up your document with unwanted headers,
etc. But you can limit its scope to just the "true" quotes and the em-dash.
I do this all the time for a newsletter I produce in Word from
contributions that range from XyWrite to plain-text e-mail.

Tim, that's exactly right. It worked for me in Word 6.0. I clicked Format,
then AutoFormat, and it converted every ASCII quote (") to a Word open- or
closed-quote. It also converted my section headings, which started with
Roman numerals I., II., etc., into "Heading 1", and it converted my
bulleted points, for which I used double dashes (--) into real bullets. It
also converted my double carrier returns between paragraphs into single
carrier returns. I didn't have enough complicated formatting to trick it,
but it seems to do a pretty good job.

>Word also has a global search/replace that's not very intuitive but useful
for turning any consistent text into something else. For instance, I use it
to turn spaced hyphens - as in this sentence - into dashes. Autoformat
doesn't cover this.

AutoFormat converted double hyphens (--) into m-dashes too. I always use
double hyphens, ever since I read the MLA style sheet decades ago.

The one thing that Xy can do better than any program I know is a precise
search and replace from any text to any text.


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Norman Bauman
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