Re: Fonts for NB

[Michael Norman michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

At 11:36 AM 3/18/2008, Bill Troop wrote:
> What's so tragic is that IF XyWin had been rewritten, in the mid-90s,
> as it easily could have been, to take on the kind of functionality
> present in Quark 3 . . . . . we'd be seeing a lot of book and magazine
> publishing being done that way -- still. And there's no excuse for the
> NB people not to have been doing this all these long, long years.
>
> What is so sacred -- at this point -- about anything in the original
> code? The screen routines were never good enough for anything but an
> early Win95-era program anyway. Font handling is a joke -- where's
> kerning? not to mention OpenType, Unicode, typographical and
> contextual support . . . . these are basic expectations today.
I'm tempted, in these tough economic times, to temper my unhappiness
with purveyors -- $3 cabinet hinges that go bad , exhaust manifolds
that fail a week after warranty, word processors with font handling
problems. Adages go to ashes; you just don't get what you pay for
anymore. With NB, I'm a bit schizophrenic. I agree with you
completely -- that program could be one kick-pants WIN word
processor. And it's frustrating -- depressing, someone else here said
-- to open it up and watch its screen hiccup and jump, watch its
"views" get stuck, its settings get changed as if some Doppleganger
were heh-hehing his way through the .dfl and .ini files undoing what
you've done, watch descenders disappear, protection faults strike and
so on and so on. But -- here's the alter ego -- I keep paying for new
iterations of the thing. I pay for them because, for better or worse,
it's XYWIN, and even XYWIN on a Model-T frame (I'm borrowing your
ideas here) is better than MSWord for the kind of work so many folks
on this list perform. Like you, I'm not straying far from XY, the
main course, but I'd sure like to have my cake too. Maybe Anne Putnam
and company, finances permitting and the market harkening, will sit
down one day and consider an overhaul, the kind of thing you propose.
Their technical support is, in the least, responsive, perhaps an omen
or an indication of ethos. Who knows. Meanwhile, thanks for weighing
in. I learned a lot from your post.
Michael Norman