Re: Lost Tribe Found

[Stephen Moore essmo@xxxxxxxx]

Having lurked here for some time, I must confess that I, too, feel
a bit intimidated by the august and distinguished company on the list.
Others having stuck their necks out first makes this self-introduction
slightly less scary -- but only slightly.

During the time I was a computer-book copyeditor and later an
acquiring editor for the now-defunct Windcrest imprint of the
now-defunct TAB Books division of the inexplicably still-funct
McGraw-Hill, I had the good fortune to be introduced to XyWrite
through copyediting David Rothman's _XyWrite Made Easier_ projects.
(I had incorporated every mod I could find into my WordStar 3.3,
firing it up from a batch file that also loaded a massive keyboard-
macro TSR. XyWrite was the obvious logical next step for me.)
"Grad school" was working with Herb Tyson on _XyWrite Revealed_,
and taking apart EasyXy to see how it worked.

When TAB's production group switched over to QuarkXPress, a couple
of fellow XyWriters and I (by now officially the editorial computer
geek) wrote a front end using keyboard file, help file, save/gets,
heavily tweaked PRN file, and stand-alone XPL, all geared to feed
XPress-tagged ASCII to Quark on Macintoshes. The concept was to
have copyeditors do the major coding in a way that was fairly
transparent to them, so that the DTP operators could concentrate
on nuances in the native Quark environment. By the time we were
shut down it was working pretty damned well. I can't imagine that
it could have been as successful as it was using any other tool than
XyWrite.

Now that I've become a network engineer (but still a part-time freelance
editor), I find that III Plus is still my all-purpose tool, rather
like a Swiss Army knife or the bits of trigonometry that stuck with
me from high school. I write and edit source code with it, and use
XPL any time there is ASCII text to be bashed about -- including
doing clean-up on 2-4 meg comma/quote-delimited database files spit
at me by Unix boxes. The faster the computer I run it on, the more
joyous it is to watch XyWrite blaze through this stuff. I'll give it
up when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers...

Stephen
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  essmo@xxxxxxxx   <*>   Never bite when a simple growl will do.
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