Re: Conversion filters

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> WordPort (DOS, version with date of 1/24/1995:
> Results: The modes, the diacritics, and the autonumbering came over correctlyÿ2E All tabs, however, except for those in hanging indent, got stripped outÿ2E The smart apostrophe/close single quote was also mucked up, being rendered as 2,3, when it should be 4,28 (this is the thing that Leslie and I called to their attention years ago and they refuse to fix)ÿ2E I did not, however, include em and en dashes, and I recall that the en dash doesn't convert correctly eitherÿ2E

This is not rocket science: I'm sure they could (or at least _should_ be able to) turn out a product
that actually does the job well. Apparently they just don't care to do so. My memory may be faulty
here, but I seem to recall that back when the Mastersoft suite was at the height of its game, it did
a pretty fair job on conversions -- appreciably better than the standard we find today.

I just read part of a long, interesting, and disheartening message thread on CNET, really blasting
the quality of so much major applications software in recent years, and the sadly deficient degree
to which the developers stand behind it. Read this, and your appreciation of what was achieved with
Xywrite can only increase exponentially.

Jordan