Re: Still need help with installing XyWrite on XP!

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

Jo Beverley wrote:
≪it seems to do everything I want with simple keystrokes. What sort of
things might I want to modify? ≫
Well, this isn't keyboard modification, but don't you use the
autocorrect spelling function to avoid having to type long phrases (or
names) that come up repeatedly? Let's say you have a Lord and Lady
Mannington-Crumblethorpe in a story. You don't want to type _that_ 10
times in a chapeter. So you create a spelling dictionary for that work,
and enter, say,
lmc Lord Mannington-Crumblethorpe
lymc Lady Mannington-Crumblethorpe
llmc Lord and Lady Mannington-Crumblethorpe
Any time you need to mention them, you just type the first letters
(lowecase) and up pops the full name and style. I use it all the time
when writing up town council meetings for the local weekly: I type byl
and get Borough Attorney Yves J. Lawless.
Another way is to create macros for things like this. Macros eat up
memory, so we generally avoid loading them as Save-Gets (there are
alternative methods, which I won't go into now). But I will use them for
certain specialized things. When writing up the police blotter, for
instance (very tame stuff for the most part: cats up trees, mice in the
washing machine, feuds over whose side of the property line the tree
branch is on) I'll load "and turned the investigation over to the
Detective Bureau" to F2 D. Saves an awful lot of keystrokes. Directions
for creating and using spelling files and macros are all in the manual
and customization guide, if you still have them.

Patricia M. Godfrey