printing & pasting weirdies

["[R. E. Stannard Jr.]" stannard@xxxxxxxx]

I'm a die-hard XYWriter (veteran of 3.1, Signature, XY4 & now XYWin) but
no power user -- more of the 97-lb-weakling class and get a lot of sand
kicked in my face...

Over the years, as I've escalated from Spark laptop to ZeosDT to CNJII
laptop to Promax Pentium DT [and begun swinging between Okilaser 400 &
HPDeskJet712C], my XYWrite has come along nicely but developed some
twitches and nervous tics.

1. On both printers a straight PRINT command will do the first page fine,
then switch the letters on all subsequent pages to a deep gray screen that
is hard to read and excruciatingly slow to print, of course.

2. Printing one page at a time (print ,1-1, ... print ,2-2, ... etc.)
gives normal copy, but see next entry.

3. Sometimes when printing a page at a time, the first will print, but all
subsequent efforts to print one or more pages will show "Done" on the
message line -- without doing anything. That applies even to making
another first page. I've sometimes gotten around by cutting & pasting to
another file first.

4. Today I succeeded in printing the undone "done" pages by highlighting
them and doing a "print" command (followed by typing "yes" to query
whether it should print selected copy)

Any ideas what's goosing the printers, or where I should look?

PASTING

I do most of my e-mail in PINE, not on a browser. From time to time I like
to cut & paste stuff into a file, preferably XYWrite. BUT:

XYWrite gags and goes catatonic if I cut & paste anything larger than five
lines -- about 50 words. It freezes the whole system -- no cursor
movement, no scrolling, no keyboard response, nada...-- and I have to do a
control-alternate-delete and end the program, which shuts down Xywrite.

I can cut and paste whole screens to Word (a sandkicker I dislike) or
the Windows notepad without a hitch.

Once in notepad and saved as text, XYWrite will open it handily or take a
normal movement command like Control-C or Control-M. But it won't swallow
more than a teaspoon of Windows paste.

Any ideas on that? I'd like to be able to select paragraphs on the fly and
pop them directly into my long-established XY files.

Oh, one more question: DIRECTORY DISPLAY

Isn't it usually enough to show any subdirectory below the one you are in
by simply typing, after the "dir" command, the remainder of the path below
that level? I get the full directory for subdirectories one step down,
but below that it displays the directory as empty of any files.
[If I type in the ENTIRE path from C: downward, then I do get the regular
display, but I shouldn't have to start back at the top, should I, if
the desired subdirectory is subordinate to the subdirectory I'm in?]
Any explanations?

	Thanks,  Ted Stannard


==== Prof. & Mrs. R.E.Stannard Jr. (Ted & Femmy), JMC Dept [226],
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO, POBox 2511, Cairo 11511, EGYPT.
ph: (20-2) r.340-7917 o.357-6200 fx: 355-7565 attn JMC Dept [226]
em: stannard@xxxxxxxx	  &  stannard@xxxxxxxx (thru Aug99)