Re: no SmartWords info

["Robert H. Kubie" rhkubie@xxxxxxxx]

I have downloaded the Nota Bene demo and am working with it. Am pleased
enough to have ordered the full whatchumacallit package (Scholars
Workstation, is it not?).
Not only does that appear to give me an updated, probably 32 bit, version
of XyWrite, which I have used with pleasure for years, but it has replaced
a very useful program on which I used to depend, that no longer works for
me. Doesn't work reliably in Windows--not in any version
That Program was one called Free Filer. What it did was uniquely useful
for me.
I keep a daily journal. Each day's file is named with the date; thus
today's file is "10-19-99" (no extension). Every phone call I make, every
note I jot down, every hour I spend working on a case or file is jotted
down in a paragraph in today's journal. Each paragraph begins with the
results of the "Now" command, i.e. with the time of day I created the
paragraph. Every such paragraph that relates to a case or matter on which
I am working begins with a three-character identifying tag for that file or
matter.
With Free Filer (in my old, DOS days) and now with the indexing and
database utilities in Nota Bene, I can go into the subdirectory that
contains all of 1999's journal files and create a new file that consists of
every paragraph that commences with the three-character tag that refers to
a particular matter, arranged in chronological order. Each paragraph will
show the name of the file it came from (which will be its date, because
that is what I have called the file) and the hour of its creation on that
date. I will, in short, have a narrative history of my activities and
expenses in that matter, showing time and date of each action or expenditure.
It is wonderful utility for billing. Much simpler and more flexible than
the fancy, specialized time and billing programs that are marketed to
lawyers.
(The latter are great, in any firm that can have a clerical employee who
spends full time running that program. They are nothing but a pain in the
neck to a semi retired, solo practitioner who spends most of his time in
labor arbitration and mediation.)
I have not yet received my full, paid-for version of the Scholar's
Workstation, but so far, the demo version seems to have been working very
well for me. I installed my old XyWrite keyboard for it and find that most
of the keystrokes I used to use carry right over. There is no "AutoCap"
icon on the Nota Bene screen, but the AutoCap feature (which I have got
used to in both XyWrite and WordPerfect) can be toggled on and off by
entering "au"  on the command line.

I will be most interested to read the comments of others, as we go along.

--Bob Kubie





At 07:54 PM 10/19/99 +0900, Yo Intl. wrote:
Myron
>Yesterday I called TTG and asked about the availability of
>SmartWords for XyWriters. The person who took my call knew no
>more than we do: it was supposed to ship on April 1.

What a telling date.

>information.   If SmartWords is *not* going to be made available to
>us in the near future I, for one, will throw my pennies to NB.
>Myron

I just did. If nothing else, I get CD with a copy of something that can
read XY files, has a command line, a Word 8 filter, and installs under
Windoze 9x without making you the laughing stock of the building you are in.



-- Rene von Rentzell, Tokyo