Re: Back-patting

["Harrison, Shawn" shawn_harrison@xxxxxxxx]

>(After
>one issue in Ventura I have dropped it and
>gone back to plain vanilla Xy4 because
>Ventura is rather buggy on footnotes)

Have you heard of the TeX typesetting system? It is absolutely bug-free,
and it make a good companion to XyWrite -- like XyWrite, it uses a
plain-ASCII format as its basis, and it does an outstanding job of
typesetting. It is at the same level of power as Ventura or Framemaker,
but instead of having to draw boxes and frames, etc., everything is
handled by mark-up and tags--which would be attractive, I think, to
XyWrite users. TeX was written by a Stanford professor, is used by many
academic journals (it's outstanding for typesetting mathematics, among
other things), and is freely available for download or for a moderate
cost on disk. The only thing not free is good documentation -- there is
usually very low quality documentation (i.e., difficult to understand)
available, but if you want to use TeX seriously, you should probably
purchase the following books (approximately $35-40 apiece):

	The TeXbook, by Donald Knuth (the author of the program, and a good
writer)
	The LaTeX Document Preparation System, by Leslie Lamport (to get going
quickly)
	The LaTeX Companion, by Michael Goossens and ... ?

(LaTeX is a set of extensions to TeX to make it easier to use.)

If you're at all interested, take a look at www.tug.org to find out more
about it. I can also answer any questions that anyone may have about it
-- but please let's do it off-list. Specifically, I can probably help you
find a copy of TeX for your platform and get it set up and going.

============================
Shawn Harrison
Associate Editor
Tyndale House Publishers
shawn_harrison@xxxxxxxx
============================
"The legal system is not fun, but it *is* an improvement
over duels and feuds." --Harvey Harrison, attorney