xy reading

[RJW823@xxxxxxxx]

A short question and a long one.

Short: What is U2? Spy plane? Rock group? Something to do with Xywrite?

Long: How do non-Xywriters read Xywrite text? Here's the reason for the
question. I am a journalist, not a scholar, but I had assumed --
incorrectly, as it turned out -- that Xywrite was generally well known in
academia.

Despite my nonacademic status, I was asked to write a longish essay (for me,
long is anything over 800 words) for a journal called Daedalus in Cambridge,
Mass. All went well, even a couple of pages of endnotes. Contributors
shipped drafts on paper to Daedalusl. After an authors' conference,
revisions, and shipment of final paper texts, we were asked to send final
texts by E-mail.

That was new to me; my experience was with columns written at home in
Xywrite, sending them by Procomm to my newspaper's Atex. So I experimented
by sending my 10,000-word piece to myself as an E-mail attachment, which
naturally opened seamlessly in Xywrite. I also opened it in MS Word --
reasonably readable, it seemed to me, though a bit cluttered with format
commands and with footnotes/endnotes in the text. All looked fixable, though
with additional work.

Daedalus editors said they couldn't read the attachment and asked me to send
a floppy. Though dubious, I did. Still unreadable. Daedalus people finally
said they would either scan the paper version or get necessary software to
read Xywrite. Evidently they succeeded, because my article appeared.

Therefore the question: To learn from the experience and avoid something like
this in the future, what should I have done to make the editors' job
manageable? I suppose I could have cleaned up the whole thing in 'Word and
re-sent the result, but I'm not very familiar with Word, recoil at its smiley
help cartoon, and also recoiled at the time at the prospect of all that extra
drudge work on my part for an article written gratis.

Bob White


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Robert J. White
4721 Girard Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55409
612 823 5878