Where is XyWrite going?

[jroth@xxxxxxxx (Joel Roth)]

This is a third message in response to collective postings on the list.
I think we can say that the people who control the product are
heading toward the mainstream--a word processor that does most
things the big guys do, while remaining slightly more easily
customized.

Xy/Dos obviously has weaknesses in Xy/Dos in formatting,
previewing and printing. The limitations were always there, but
they were no big deal when the most serious business formatting
outside of professional publishing was done with Ventura and
PageMaker.

I still see no problem with using Xy as a text editor. It's an
"orphan" product in that Wolfgang Bechstein cannot get a German
spelling checker, although he might get an external utility that
would do almost the same job.

Personally I've always used the Xy batch spell-check mode. It
seems much faster than to use interactive spelling checkers.

The only way I can imagine to adopt this "orphan" would be to
reverse engineer the whole thing in C++ or something as a
configurable text editor, add SGML support for doing long regular
documents, (supply an external formatter for that) and let people
use their current Xy (or WP or whatever) to format documents that
don't require the strait-jacket approach of SGML.

Several people have criticized the direction Xy has moved, but
much the same can be said of Word Perfect. I know several people
who swear by version 5.1 and don't plan to update.

Another "abandoned" product is Borland's Sprint, which I
understand has an excellent formatter and text processing tools.

Any program can be called a work of art, since it is an amalgam
of numerous individual compromises. We like Xy because it's
simpler than formatters like Tex and nroff, we can "sort of see"
the effect of our formatting and the codes can be hidden in a
cute way, or edited if we like. It does some tricks, but not all
tricks.

If we want Xy to support a more capable and comprehensive
standard we will definitely lose something. We might have ten
unfamiliar choices where previously things were much simpler.

There are numerous "text editors" that are unsatisfactory for use
because perhaps they lack an online spell checker or thesaurus,
or they don't reformat paragraphs for us, or we can't reconfigure
the keyboard quite as we'd like it.

I don't think we have much hope of getting Xy just like it was
with the one extra feature we wanted, since that "one feature" is
probably different for everyone.

--
Joel Roth