Re: File problem....

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from "M.W. Poirier"  Fri, 26
Jul 2002 21:13:51 -0400 (EDT)

> I have a relatively short file of approximately 20 pages with
> 34 footnotes, many of which are quite long.

If the footnotes are long enough, they can exceed XyWrite's ability
to format text for display and printing. This is not a "bug", such
as the screen-refresh errors that sometimes afflict Page-Line view,
but a design limit. I don't know what the maximum footnote length
is, but I just created an 80K dummy file consisting of some text and
three 23K footnotes (so that the footnotes comprise most of the
file), and saw exactly the behavior you described. Scrolling in
non-eXPanded view and an attempt to print to a file (TYF) both
produced Error 52 ("Cannot continue scrolling"), meaning that Xy
cannot allocate enough memory to perform those functions. Yes, this
is one reason we need a 32-bit Xy.

In your case, it sounds as though the difficulties may stem from one
particularly long footnote. You might try dividing the file in two,
so that the troublesome footnote is the first FN delta in the second
file, or even in three, with the long footnote and accompanying text
in a file all their own, using the SF and SP commands to adjust
footnote and page numbers as needed. Or you can move all of the
footnotes to a separate file, and append it to your main file to
create endnotes, using automatic counters in both files to number
the notes. (If you opt to move footnotes, DO NOT use U2 routine
MOVEFN; it won't work if the footnotes do not display
properly in draft view. I'm going to modify MOVEFN so that it will
be useful in a situation like this.)

Finally, there are, I hear, other word-processors. It would be
encouraging to find out that NB for Windows has abolished the limit
on footnote length.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/