Re: NBWin comments

[Nicholas Clifford clifford@xxxxxxxx]

Myron Gochnauer wrote:

> Like many of you I've been trying out NBWin in the hope that it
> would provide a *living* alternative to XyWin. NB appears to be
> responsive to bug reports --- something to which we XyWriters are
> no longer accustomed. Strange and comforting indeed.
>
> But, for what it's worth...

I, too, at last got my NB Demo and have been messing around with it. There
are some things I like very much about it:

  the way so much of my Xy4 customization (Save gets, keyboard, etc.) can
be taken over so easily.

  the command line, and the ability to show a decent folder directory
(unlike Word)

  the handling of footnotes, far superior to any other program

  the way you can still get into the *.KBD files and make changes, as you
could with XyWrite (tho it wd be nice to give us a XyW style keyboard layout
diagram so we know what keys we're dealing with).

  The way you can open it up to see codes (like Xy, but unlike Word) and
thus sometimes find what might be causing trouble.

But NB strikes me as still a work in progress.

  no way of reminding yourself what your save-get file contains (unless, as
the Help notes helpfully point out, you keep your own records).

  inadequate handling of tables (I know it's heresy to say anything nice
about MS-Word on this list, but tables are really easy, as they are not in
either XyWrite or NB. I gather an improvement is coming.

  inadequate documentation, as some others have commented. Most striking is
the total silence on programming (the word's not even in the index), although
if you open up the NB.KEY file, you can see how to turn programming on and
off. How you run your program, however, is a complete mystery; simply saving
it as a *.pgm file and typing "run xyz.pgm" in the command line doesn't seem
to work.

  importation of Word files is by no means perfect -- dashes and quotation
marks don't seem to come through very well. I've had better luck translating
MS 7.0 files into XyWrite for Windows via WFW filters, and then calling up
the translated file in NB.

  So I may kick in my $200+ (including shipping), but I'm not going to get
rid of either XyWrite IV or MS-Word.

Nick Clifford
clifford@xxxxxxxx