Re: general curiosity

[hickling@xxxxxxxx (Lee Hickling)]

Paul Cowan wrote:
>Have you any general information on Xywrite? I hear on Lantra-L that it's
>some kind of classic.
I bought XyWrite recently after years of reading and hearing about what a
great program it is for writers. I got the latest (the last?) version for
Windows, and already wish I'd bought the DOS version. I subscribed to this
list to get more help in mastering it. What I got was a lot of exchanges
between advanced users about its programming capabilities (which I may use
some day, but not just yet) and about bugs that so far I haven't gotten deep
enough into the program to encounter.
What I have found is that XW is a powerful program, and also every bit as
hard to learn as I'd been told. And I am not a novice, having run many
different word processing apps in the 20-plus years I've been using computers.
Here's an example of my problems: I create and name a new document, and find
that the program has defaulted to the Courier face, and none of the commands
I try will change it to Swiss. The only way I can get the typeface menu is
to start with an untitled document. Which is OK, but it seems as though
there should be a way to change fonts even though I named the document going
in. Yes, I have the Reference Guide and I did read TFM. It was singularly
unhelpful with that problem.
Is there (or was there ever) a Q book or other third-party manual that is
written in fairly clear English and organized so that one doesn't have to
know the answer to a question before you can ask it?
What XW needs is a manual like the one that used to come with Xerox Ventura
Publisher, which guided a beginner effortlessly through the intricacies of
that great old program, and contained a marvelous tutorial to boot. (I still
keep VP 2.0 on my hard disk, in spite of being limited to out-of-date
printer drivers with it.)

Lee Hickling            
hickling@xxxxxxxx