Re: Audit trail

["Patricia M. Godfrey" pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

The problem is showing how the two versions differ: what you've added,
what you've deleted, what you've moved from one place to another (whether
you just transposed i and e when the author typed "recieve" or moved a
whole paragraph from p. 10 to p. 20), what you've changed the font or
specification of (from ital to roman or roman to ital, or from A head to
B head or vice versa). And doing this on a _printout_ (because the author
absolutely must NOT get his or her hands on the file at this stage) in a
way that will be legible to an impatient author. XyWrite's Redlining,
though better than other word processors', has serious drawbacks:
1) once you've entered changes, spell check will choke, because it
considers the ≪MD+IN≫ and ≪MD+DE≫ codes part of the words; 2) if you
change the mode of a word (ital to roman, or bold to ital), it shows the
whole original selection deleted and then inserted in the new format; 3)
it cannot natively show transpositions as opposed to deletions or
insertions (one can work around this with a lebel/comment, but they don't
print); 4) the result, unless the author was superbly skillful, is simply
illegible.

On the other hand, XyWrite's ability to spell check to a file is
WONDERFUL. It not only lets one create a style sheet at one fell swoop,
it also enables one to catch inconsistencies that even the most
eagle-eyed copy editor might miss in the course of a long MS (e.g., Prof.
Fiegelmann on p. 16, Prof. Feiglemann on p. 123).
Patricia