Re: Xy Manuals Online (Nota Bene)

[oport@xxxxxxxx (Otis Port)]

Peter Evans notes:
> I'd thought Nota Bene was first published by ... Dragonfly

Right on. But there was some reason why they didn't or couldn't use that
name when NB was repurchased. May have been in the purchase contract or
a conflict with some other company (maybe Dragon Systems, the voice-
recognition company, has a product with a similar name?). Whatever, the
first new name for Dragonfly was N.B. Informatics, which became Nota Bene
Associates. (Had I known you were interested in the full history, I'd
have included this in previous post.)

and:
> what are format conversion routines that are of some use on
> heavily formatted text? (XyWrite's own export functions are rapid and
> uncomplaining, but the target program, such as WordPerfect, tends to find
> the results indigestible. Meanwhile, WordPerfect's way of importing a Xy
> file seems to be to ignore virtually everything that's not ASCII.)

  In case you didn't know, the format-conversion filters in XyW are
licensed from Mastersoft, which was acquired by Adobe (and perhaps sold
recently; I'm pretty sure I saw something in the last couple weeks about
Adobe's selling this product line to another company). The Adobe File
Utilities CD-ROM's DOS section (there also are Mac, Win/Win95, and Unix
sections) contains 200-odd filters, many of which are upgraded from or
absent in the filters that came with XyDos 4.017.
  These filters are supposed to convert from almost anything to anything.
Since I don't use WPerfect, I can't comment on how well they do there.
  If my memory about Adobe's selling this product is correct, could be
there'll be markdowns on the Adobe cd-rom. Original price, as I recall,
was around $100, +/-$20.