A variety of difficult questions

[Charles Herold (charles.herold@xxxxxxxx)]

  Alright experts, let's see what y'all know. These are
problems that TTG couldn't or wouldn't answer (since they won't
answer my letters I have to use phone support, and some of these
questions are confusing over the phone). There aren't really
that many problems with Xy4 that anything can be done about.
Most of the problems are just that they've done things wrong (the
awkward insert characters setup, the lack of a tab set feature,
which III+ had, aborting a printing job whenever my printer runs
out of paper, the lack of an ELSE command in XPL, the fact that
if you press escape when the spellchecker hits a double word it
deletes the second word). But maybe some of these other things
can be figured out?

First, one XyIII+ question, because I think if I could fix
this one thing with XyIII+ then I would just give up on Xy4
altogether (pretty sad when the upgrade's a step *down*, isn't
it? I remember seeing a presentation years ago on an upgrade to
Word Perfect and when they were announcing their innovations I
was thinking "XyWrite's had that for years," but now I have to
use Word Perfect 5.1 a lot of the time, and while it annoys me, it's
never froze on me and it doesn't have any really stupid major
glitches that I know of.) XyIII+ always truncated long files.
For example, if I edited the XyIII+ help file, it would only save
part of it. Has anyone encountered this and found a way around it?

  But let's assume I'm stuck with XyWrite 4.017 and ask some questions
about that one:

1.  If I put "df dr=d:\,c:\xy4" into my settings.dfl file, I
find "va dr" will give me "d:\" and I've found that when d: fills
up XyWrite does not start using c:\xy4 for .TMP files. So I just
use "df dr=c:\xy4". Does this work properly for anyone else?

2.  Certain key combinations don't work in XyWrite, even though
they work in other programs. For example, if I try and set the
bookmark with Left-Ctrl+Left-Shift+B, it doesn't do anything, but
will activate the bookmark program if I use Right-Ctrl+Right-
Shift+B. On the other hand, either the right or left
Ctrl+Shift+G combination works for going to a bookmark. Some key
combinations worked at first and now don't; such as Ctrl+F5.
Ctrl+R worked, then didn't, but now does. XyWrite is the only
program I have this problem with, in Wordperfect, Ctrl+R and
Ctrl+F5 work just fine! Is there something that can be done
about this? (I know XyWrite has their own unique way of reading
the keyboard, but still...)

3.  Is it possible to load dict.spl some way other than by
typing a word with auto-correct on or running the spell checker.
There's a considerable pause when it loads, and I'd like to just
get all the waiting done at once, instead of this lag time after
I type something. (Due to lack of memory, when dict.spl loads I
get the "creating temporary file, do not remove drive c:"
message. Those of you with a lot of memory probably never see
this.) "load \xy4\dict.spl" won't work.

4.  XyWrite will not let me have a margin of less than 3.6
inches when printing. Someone at TTG told me to change something
in my Deskjet+ printer file (I don't remember what it was) but it
didn't actually help. Suggestions?

5.  The Fix Spell in Xy4 has been my main nemesis. III+ would
check a word and then return the cursor to where it was when you
called FS. Xy4 changed this so the cursor would go to the word
after the word you're fixing/checking. Actually, at first it was
unpredictable: some keys returned you to your cursor position,
some keys took you to the next word. But as of 4.017 you will
*always* go to the next word. I have put an XPL program in my command
set file which stores the cursor position and goes back to it. There
are two main problems. First, if the word has been corrected and
is no longer the same length, I will be off a character or two.
Second, I have to check for the possibility that I am adding the
word to the speller, in which case the "Capitalize first letter"
box might come up. TTG tells me there is no way to know if a
menu is up or not, so I have to check the keystroke and assume if a
function key is pressed that the query box was up and if another key was
pressed that it wasn't, which usually works, more or less. (I have a
couple of ideas on these, but they're very clumsy.)

6.  Another problem (I'm not sure at this point if the problem
still exists in 4.017, which I've just got, but it probably does,
since it's existed in every version since 4.014) is that the
spell check will only see part of a word, this happening if I've
changed a word in the spell checker. For example, if I were to
type the word elephnt, press Ctrl+E, then escape, go to the word
and change it to elephant and then run Ctrl+E again, it will
think the word is "nt." I find this also happens if I were to
fix "elephnt" from within the spell checker function.

7.  In my fix of the spell checker, I needed to capture function
keys and pass them on. I found I could not do it directly, and
wonder if there's a way. The way *I* had to do it is:
(note: H@ and Q1 are XyWrite codes, ≪ and ≫ are representations for th
XPL brackets)
≪sv05,H@≫≪sx10,≪rc≫≫≪if≪is10≫==≪is05≫≫Q1≪ei≫.
What I *cannot* do is:
≪sx10,≪rc≫≫≪if≪is10≫==≪is05≫≫≪pv10≫≫≪ei≫, as
this might call the help file, but will not trigger Q1.

8.  I don't load a printer file when I start (to save time, as I
frequently don't print anything), and have changed PrintInit so
that if no printer is loaded it says JM (0a), thus running setp.
What I want to know is, why, after running setp, doesn't it
return to PrintInit and continue on. It seems to stop there, and
I have to press Ctrl-P a second time to get the print menu.

9.  Sometimes I hit an accidental key combination and get the
capital E with the ' over it. I've never been able to recreate
this on purpose. Anyone know what key combination I'm hitting?

10.  Is there a VA variable that would let me know if the
mouse was on the scroll bars? (For a possible XPL program I'm
thinking of.) For that matter, does anyone have a complete list
of VA variables?

Sorry this is so long.

   Charles Herold -- Citizen of the Whirl
     charles.herold@xxxxxxxx