RE: Rescue Xy3

["Daniel L. De Hainaut" Young_DeHainaut@xxxxxxxx]

Shawn et al.,

When I first switched from 3 to 4 I recall feeling the absence of a quickly
accessible ASCII character list (although I believe that in standard issue
Xy3 it took at least two steps to get to the Type 2 help frame that let you
chose from a short line of ASCII characters). I think I worked a bit on a
Xy4 workaround (I'm pretty sure the old Type 2 frame actually worked in
Xy4, albeit rather slowly on my old 286). At the time I was just getting
used to the Xy4 menu and dialog formats, so I didn't come up with a very
satisfactory solution, other than to keep the ASCII character chart from my
Xy3 manual handy.

Now that my Xy4 programming ability has caught up, I haven't felt the need
strongly enough to put in the time.

It does seem to me that the main thing that slows down the Xy4 unassigned
character process is that there are so many more characters to choose from
beyond the 160 or so out of the extended-ASCII 255 that we might have left
unassigned on our Xy3 keyboards. Simply paring down the available
characters to the classic 8 bits' worth would probably streamline things
considerably, at the expense of choice.

Looking at the problem today, with my manuals at work and me at home, I see
that I might leapfrog straight to the Insert Character dialog box by
assigning "JM,(,I,n,s,C,h,a,r,M,s,t,r,)" to a key. Adding a choice of
"Classic ASCII Characters" above the existing catagories of Latin,
Mathematics, Drawing, and so forth would only require a bit of mindless
copy-cat dialog programming (a personal specialty). Trouble is, looking at
the problem today, it just doesn't seem like that much of a problem....

Speaking as one who bought Xy4 and lived with the disks and manuals for a
full year before I was willing to give up my accumulation of Xy3
customization and start relatively fresh with Xy4, I maintain that the one
truly superior word processor continues to be the one you truly know how to
use. You understand and accommodate its strengths and weaknesses and, if
it happens to be XyWrite (any version), you can also make it accommodate
yours.


Dan De Hainaut
103105.1262@xxxxxxxx