Re: Translating XyWin to Word or WordStar

["R Tennenbaum"]

On Sun, 14 Jun 1998 16:43:21 +0000, Michael P. Kube-McDowell wrote:

>> Unless you are collaborating on
>> a virtually finished version that is camera ready, why worry about
>> desktop publishing features in a manuscript anyway?
>
>Actually, the manuscript is just about devoid of all DTP-type
>features. I'd settle for a clean translation of the text into
>double-spaced 65-character monospaced lines with paragraph indents,
>no hyphenation, and a running header with page numbers.

You should be able to do that in less than a second -- though it might
take 5-10 minutes to set it up. Xywrite comes with a printer file
called (I think) mail.prn -- or strip.prn might be able to do it as
well. All you do is load this as a printer file -- you can do it
either through the menus or directly from the command line:

 load mail.prn

Then go to the window your document's in and run:

 typef

You'll get a file called fo.tmp that should be formatted as you
desired. If mail.prn doesn't work, try strip.prn; if the formatting
still isn't what you want, mess around with your document defaults till
you get it.

RTF probably is the way to go, but if you're translating between three
different wp formats your job's not going to be easy in any case. I
don't know about the WordStar format, but I suspect if you can get
whoever's working on the ms in Word to be sure he sends any rewrites in
RTF you can convert back and forth pretty easily. Else you'll just
have to run Word to work on that version.


-Rafe T.
raphaelt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.ray-field.com

>My files
>really couldn't be much simpler, which adds to the frustration over
>being unable to port them.


>
>>Though I have been
>> asked repeatedly by editors and publishers to provide text in a
>> particular format, I have rarely complied; yet, they somehow managed to
>> be able to use my XyWrite (well, actually NotaBene) files just fine.
>> Remember plain text can be read by everyone. Let someone else worry
>> about what it looks like on the page, especially when dealing with a 680
>> page manuscript.
>
>By and large, that's the approach I take. Bantam (our publisher) uses
>a typesetting service which can cope perfectly well with XyWrite
>files, and did so on my last three books for them. But I do consider
>it understandable that my agent, editor, and collaborator all would
>like to be able to use the software that they're familiar with, and
>not have to do a lot of flyspecking or Computer Wizard tricks to get
>there.
>
>Best,
>
>    K-Mac
>
>
>  ---] Michael Paul McDowell, writing as Michael P. Kube-McDowell
>  ---] Author of THE QUIET POOLS and STAR WARS: THE BLACK FLEET CRISIS
>  ---] Web Site: http://www.sff.net/people/K-Mac
>  ---] Newsgroup: sff.people.Kube-McDowell at server NEWS.SFF.NET
>