Re: xy reading

[Richard Giering dick.giering@xxxxxxxx]

I suggest you use the "printer" file caled strip.prn and typef , on the command line. The new file would be a stripped version
of the current file withour any of the xywrite commands. Any word processor can
then load it as a "plain text file"
Dick Giering

RJW823@xxxxxxxx wrote:

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