Re: Conversion filters

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

The WordPerfect ones handle some things (e.g., autonumbering, at which WP
itself does a perfectly LOUSY job) OK; they can convert boldface and
underlining, but NOT italics (whether you use additive or absolute modes;
i.e., neither ≪MD+IT≫ nor ≪MDIT≫ results in any kind of a WP
formatting tag). Hence, I maintain that the claim to be a XYW 4 filter is
simply a lie; one of the great gains of 4 over 3 was the ability to have
italics (rather than defining MDBR as ital in your printer driver).
Labels come over quite nicely as nonprinting comments (which is useful
when I've used them for editorial queries). But any of the above-256
codes get utterly scrambled; thus you cannot have, e.g., em dashes, smart
quotes, or any accented characters beyond those in Standard ASCII. My
workaround for this is to use ` and ' for single quotes, { and } for
double, and then search and replace once I'm in WordImperfect. And of
course WP doesn't let you search and replace modes by themselves; you
have to have some text, and there are no text wildcards; so one cannot
just use underline in Xy and then change to ital in WP.
Interestingly--and maddeningly--if you Save As Xy from WordPerfect you
get a better file than the other way around: but the whole point is that
one wants XyW's utter accessibility to formatting to clean up a file, and
then perhaps wants to convert it back for the poor slobs who never heard
of Xy.
	WordPort's filters do get italics over, but they don't get the em and en
dashes right (and both Leslie and I have told them so and as far as I
know--I've not bothered upgrading it for several years--they refused to
fix it).
	As for Word, there may be another route. If you hit Alt-Shift-F11 when
you're in a Word Doc, you get the XML file that underlies the Word doc.
(The nearest thing that kludge has to expanded mode or reveal codes.) So
it should be possible to use XY to HTML, and then cut and paste that into
a Word doc displayed as XML, should it not? (I try to do as little in
Word as possible: the wretched piece of garbage just corrupted my printer
setup, so I had to uninstall and reinstall the whole printer-fax-scanner
megillah. It also turned both my parallel ports into modems! Had to have
been Word; everything was fine, then I had to work on Word files for a
client and print them out, and the next time I booted up, the printer
wouldn't print. Grr.)
	About NBWin vs. XyWin: it seems to me that both or either is needed only
for printing. For writing, editing, formatting, anything else you can
imagine, XyDOS does fine (and runs rings around any other word
processor). It's big lack is not supporting TrueType, so that unless you
have an HP 4 or Postscript printer, or one that can emulate them, you're
stuck with Times, Helvetica, and Courier, and portrait mode. So some
years ago, after vainly trying to get WordImPerfect to give me a
complexly numbered document, I bit the bullet and purchased XyWin just so
I could print out the doc in Garamond or Caslon after I had created and
revised it in XyDOS. Of course, when one's clients insist on using those
other word processors, we do have a problem, but unless NBWin has current
conversion filters, I don't see that it offers that much.
Patricia