RE: Back-patting

["Daskin, Alan" Alan.Daskin@xxxxxxxx]

My apologies to list members. (I had meant to forward Jon Ingg's message to
a colleague who is skeptical about anything from the pre-Windows era; I did
not mean to reply to the list.)

In any case, I have used various versions of XyWrite since the late 1980s.
For several years I used it extensively for preparing teaching materials.
Now that I'm in the private sector (economics consulting firm) I try to use
it whenever I can, working around the limitations of my office, which is a
confirmed Microsoft office. At one time I saw some minor advantages in using
Word's equation editor - I'm an economist, so I often use math in my
documents - but Word has become so slow and cumbersome for such purposes
that I rarely use it for math. When I need to do a lot of math typing, I
shift to Scientific Word, which is basically a Windows interface for TeX.
I'd love to hear about better (or simpler) solutions or add-ins) that would
allow me to type math (including decently formatted fractions, etc.) in
XyWrite.

Alan J. Daskin (Jeff)
 mailto:Alan.Daskin@xxxxxxxx Alan.Daskin@xxxxxxxx

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Daskin, Alan [SMTP:Alan.Daskin@xxxxxxxx]
	Sent:	Monday, October 19, 1998 8:33 AM
	To:	xywrite@xxxxxxxx
	Subject:	RE: Back-patting

	And you thought I was a Neanderthal holdout! (This is just one of
many such
	stories recently.)
	
		-----Original Message-----
		From:	Jon Inggs [SMTP:INGGSEJ@xxxxxxxx]
		Sent:	Monday, October 19, 1998 3:41 AM
		To:	xywrite@xxxxxxxx
		Subject:	Re: Back-patting

		 
		>I think it would be great to hear of other
		things being done with XyWrite,
		>pedestrian or exotic. 

		I have used XyWrite III+ and IV to produce
		12 volumes of The South African Journal of
		Economic History since 1987. This has
		involved crunching well over a million words
		in 144 articles, averaging 53694 words an
		issue.

		Not being shy about punting XyWrite, let me
		quote from my article on the first decade of
		the journal in Vol 11(1), March 1996 (there
		is a copy available at:
		http://home.intekom.com/joni/1ST-DEC.HTM):
		"Apart from Vol 1(1), all the journals to
		date have been produced using XyWrite which
		even in 1996 remains the fastest and most
		versatile DOS-based text editor available.
		Not surprisingly its roots lie in the
		newspaper world's mainframe Atex editing
		system on which most South African
		journalists cut their teeth in the early
		1980s. On the PC front, however, the modern
		trend towards semi-desktop publishing
		Windows-based word processing packages is
		definitely a step backwards as far as speed
		and text manipulation is concerned. Fairly
		sophisticated layout capabilities have been
		traded for a drop-off in performance which
		has to be compensated for by faster and more
		expensive hardware. As a result the journal
		is now edited using the no frills XyWrite 4
		for DOS and then laid out in Ventura 5, a
		Windows desktop publisher, so that the best
		can be had from both environments." (After
		one issue in Ventura I have dropped it and
		gone back to plain vanilla Xy4 because
		Ventura is rather buggy on footnotes)

		I also use Xy4 to produce all my study
		material for the two Economic History
		courses I teach here at the University of
		South Africa, which is one of the world's
		biggest distance teaching universities with
		over 120 000 students. My department as a
		whole, unfortunately, left XyWrite for
		WordPerfect 6 last year after being
		pressurised by the University to conform to
		their "standard". Until then, the
		Department's 20 000+ students received
		XyWrite prepared tutorial material. I
		personally will NOT be conforming. The more
		I use my recently installed Windoze 95, the
		less I like it. I still, however, get great
		pleasure helping a colleague out by
		importing a document they are struggling
		with in WP6, fixing it in a flash in Xy4,
		and then exporting it back for them to carry
		on making it look pretty in WP6.

		I come from an Atex background on the
		newspaper I worked for in the early 1980s. I
		wrote my thesis on a Commodore CBM32 in Word
		Pro 3+ in the mid-1980s - with all of 32K of
		memory, I could only get two pages into a
		document - no spell checkers and the like (I
		subsequently converted it to XyWrite and
		found three spelling mistakes!). My CBM32 is
		now in the Cape Town Computer Museum (along
		with the slide rule I used for Physics at
		high school in the early 1970s).

		My most useful XyWrite tool (apart from
		those generated by Robert and Carl) is an
		XPL routine that extracts footnotes so that
		I can edit them separately and another that
		puts them back when I have finished editing.
		Most of the Economic History articles I edit
		for the journal contain between 50 and 100
		footnotes.

		I am also the Economics Department's
		webmaster and use Xy4 for all my HTML coding
		(see
		http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/ecn/index.html).
		The HTML W4W converter from the Bulgarian
		site mentioned previously in this news group
		has been a great help.

		As they say out here on the southern tip of
		Africa: Viva! Viva XyWrite!

		Regards
		Jon Inggs