Re: Xy4 Customization Guide Preview

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

In view of all the varying recommendations for fonts (serif, sans,
larger, smaller), it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps Bry could save
himself a lot of work by just giving us the formatted (you are using Use
Styles, no?) Xy files. Robert mentioned them a while back as a
desideratum to make the job easier for Bry. But since he's had to scan
and OCR, why should he have to do PDFs too? Then each XyWriter could put
the files in whichever font he'or she had and liked; if you want PDFs,
they're easy enough to create with Xy2PDF.
I mentioned Use Styles, because Xy's (unlike the idiotic setup in Weird
and WordImPerfect) have inheritance: Define your styles without
reference to font (just specifying size, bold, ital, indention, etc.)
and then specify your font before any SS command, and all the subsequent
styles will be in that font. (I do this all the time when setting up
handouts for seminars: I have a basic SS block, with several levels of
heading, initial paragraph (fl. left), regular paragraph (.5 indented),
bulleted list, sample sentences (≪IP.5in,.5in,.5in≫) and so on. The I
just enter UF Whatever at the beginning and before the header SSs.
If Bry still wants PDFs for his site, perhaps those of us who decide to
make PDFs could send him samples, and he could pick the one he likes best?
Another advantage of plain Xy files is that we could then annotate them
as we like. I know I have some jottings in my hard-copy manuals that I'd
want to put in any electronic version; but lacking Acrobat, I'd not be
able to do that to a pre-made PDF.

Patricia M. Godfrey