Wordport 5.2 (NB4 to Xy4)

[NASSH100@xxxxxxxx]

Recently on the notabene list there has been a discussion of a recent release
of the WordPort document conversion program (v. 5.2). Wordport explicitly
claims to handle NB (all versions) and XY (all versions, including XYWIN). I
repost the following here, for any that might be interested.

Allan Needell, Dept. of Space History, Nat'l Air & Space Museum
   Smithsonian Institution, MRC 311, Washington, DC 20560 i:
nassh100@xxxxxxxx; b: nassh100@sivm; CServe: 71461,1115
      tel 202/357-2828; fax 202/786-2947
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
To: NOTABENE--CMSNAMES notabene list

From: Allan Needell
Subject: Wordport 5.2 (NB4 to Xy4)

For any who might be interested, yesterday I used the new WordPort 5.2 to
convert an entire book manuscript (Modified CMS, footnotes each chapter,
Chapter titles, Heads and 2 levels of subheads) from NB 4 to xy4 to see how it
looked using XYWIN.

I note the following. By and large the transfer was clean. It was not perfect,
but--except as noted below--required minimal clean up.

Minor problems:

As I mentioned before, my RHA deltas did not transfer properly. The A in
RHA was interpreted as a character, setting off a chain reaction of improper
nesting of format commands. The Running Header delta in XYWIN was easily edited
in expanded mode, so it caused not real problem.

The NB FS and FW deltas did not transfer. Instead they were executed as text at
the top of each chapter (i.e. there is a one inch line followed by a margin to
margin line at the top of each chapter document). The lines are easily erased.
XYWIN can insert FS and FW deltas very easily.

The prompt at the beginning of the NB document that identifies the manual style
was brought over to XYWIN as text. I simply erased it.

More major is the following BUG/Feature.

Instead of translating the NB footnote format delta (FMn) into a XYWIN
FM delta, Wordport inserted separate formatting commands at the beginning of
EACH note.I should note that it did this very well. The
WYSIWYG diplay and a sample printout look absolutely perfect. But it is not the
best way to format notes in XYWIN (as it wouldn't be in NB). I haven't tackled
the clean up routing. Inserting a XYWIN FMn delta is easy, globally removing
the individual format deltas from the notes may take a bit of work.

I can see what happened here. Wordport translates from NB to a standard
platform, and then to the destination format. Since most other programs do not
have a global FM command, it had to be sacrificed for generality.

The good news is that if TTG decides to contract with ACI for a NB to XY
filter, this problem is easy to get rid of. I hope they do, and add to xyWIN a
number of Manual styles based on NB.

Allan Needell, Dept. of Space History, Nat'l Air & Space Museum
   Smithsonian Institution, MRC 311, Washington, DC 20560 i:
nassh100@xxxxxxxx; b: nassh100@sivm; CServe: 71461,1115
      tel 202/357-2828; fax 202/786-2947