Re: How does XyWrite compare with Nota Bene? -Reply

[Watts Martin mika@xxxxxxxx]

I'm kind of the odd man out here -- I use Nota Bene, not XyWrite; I
subscribed to this list mostly for the XPL resources, and because I am NB's
token non-academic user, and figured this list might hold answers that the
Nota Bene folks wouldn't be able to easily answer (like the screenplay
question I had earlier).

NB is basically a 'value-added' version of XyWrite III+, with most of its
extra features relating to academic use. The reason I got it rather than
XyWrite, if I'm not NB's target audience? Well, XyWrite would have cost me
$495 from TTG, and no local store had copies of it. NB 4.2 was $250, and
included Orbis, Ibid., Ibid. Plus and Tabula--all extra-cost features with Xy.

The interface of the two programs is similar, but by no means identical; the
key mappings appear to have been changed pretty substantially in NB, and my
understanding is that current versions of XyWrite for DOS have a WYSIWYG
mode that has no corresponding feature in NB.

Beyond that, the biggest difference that I can tell between the systems
boils down to active development. XyWrite appears to be on its way to
mutating into something else, and while people get frustrated with the new
Nota Bene company (the original company, N.B. Informatics, merged with TTG a
while ago, and then apparently spun off again in 1995), in general they seem
to have a better reputation amongst vocal NB users than TTG does amongst
vocal XyWrite users. NB released version 4.5 in the middle of this year,
and they're working on a new version of Ibid (I suspect written with the
folks at Oberon, who produce an award-winning bibliography program called
Citation, but that's only a hunch). NB is still DOS-only, but I've run it
under Windows, Windows NT, and Linux (!), and 4.5 is designed to be Windows
95 friendly. (Whether it's been successful at that so far is apparently
open to debate.) A true Windows version is coming. Overall, they're working
pretty hard at promoting NB, albeit only (so far) in its vertical market of
academia.