Re: XyWin & bug vs. feature

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from "..."  Mon, 20 Jan 1997 08:47:12 -0500 (EST)

Dear Annie:

I just don't understand the gravity of this 'unbidden Page-Line toggle'
complaint. I am loading the same document into both v3.57 and v4.017
simultaneously, and toggling back and forth between them, to A-B the
appearance. It is a document consisting of 10 columns, about 150
characters wide altogether when printed out (necessarily in Landscape) on
an H-P laser. What I observe is this:

Func WG (VA$DT=1) yields quite different animals in these two word
processors. Not comparable. They may both be called "WG" or DT=1, but
they are not the same, apples vs. oranges. What v4.017 calls WG is a
*COMPLETELY NEW* view mode, unknown in v3.57. What v3.57 calls WG is what
v4.017 calls SP. It's been obvious since Sig One that XyQuest made a v4
design decision that there's not enough difference between WG and SP (as
v3.57 defines them) to warrant maintaining the distinction. So they
chucked v3.57's WG entirely. If you use the SP mode of v4.017, you get
nearly identical screen formatting to the WG mode of v3.57. Identical, at
least as far as I can see, except for the Page break indicator (trivial,
IMO). If that formatting pleased user in v3.57, user still has it.

So, what is this new mode, anyway? In v4.017, WG mode arrays the "columns"
vertically -- one  per line, instead of displaying all
columns on a single horizontal line like v3.57. In other words, instead of
this kind of appearance:

 Col1  Col2  Col3  Col4  Col5 ...

we get:

 Col1
 Col2
 Col3
 Col4
 Col5
 ...

A handy format for working on databases, IMO. It allows user to see a
complete data record (up to 22 columns) on a single textmode screen. User
no longer needs any of those special functions (EC, TL, TR, etc) to move
around between columns. If you glance up at the Ruler line, a
highlight indicates where the column you're currently editing will actually
appear, horizontally, when printed. Each individual column wraps at the
width specified in the document's CT command.

I think its worth at least passing mention in this thread that
there's *nothing* like any of this in v3.57 -- that Xy4 WG has virtues
worth evaluating on their own terms! That you lose nothing (except SP
without a line break indicator), while you gain something significantly
different, which enlarges editing options.

For six years I've been maintaining a 300Kb XyWrite database with 1500
records and ten entries (columns) per record -- a list of categories of
silva and flora in an arboretum that I manage. Fiddle with it at least
once/week. Can't remember that this document has *ever* toggled unbidden
into SP on a SEarch. And I certainly do NOT work on columnar documents in
XP -- you've mentioned that, what, three times now? -- you impute a certain
insane fundamentalism to me which is fantasy. Lacking carriage returns as
they do, columnar docs are nearly impossible to read in XP.

As for Mr. Enterline's comment that:

> When I do Ctrl-End it goes there and displays the actual end of the
> document in Draft View while doing its calculation for "Changing to
> Formatted View." But when it is finished calculating, the display
> switches to the beginning of the endnotes many pages before the actual
> end.

that's hardly "another piece of the behaviour". That's the way XyWrite has
always worked. The "beginning of the endnotes" is still the end of the
actual document; you've reached EOF. Displaying a doc in formatted mode
never meant that you could edit all of it as displayed. Compare running
headers/footers, for example: you can't edit them where they display, but
only by opening an edit window at the point where they're embedded in text.
Same with footnotes. Always been that way.

FWIW...


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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