RE A critique of Word & Co.

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Many, many thanks to Richard Henderson. Neither my own town public
library nor that of the nearest other town in the county carry the
current copies, so I was looking at a trip to the county seat. Not all
that far, but midweeks are hectic here.

I've never even tried to do footnotes in Weird. Nor WordImPerfect either,
that I can recall. Footnotes are one of the things that MUST be done in
Xy, no matter the hassle of converting back and forth. Oh, yes, now I
remember: one client's MS was in WordImPerfect and a mess of redundant
formatting. So I pulled it into Xy, cleaned out all the garbage,
straightened out the references, exported back to WP--and then had to
spend umpteen hours formatting all footnotes to hanging indent (this was
WP vers. 5.1, and had NO options for format footnote).

Menand is so right about the stylistic problems with notes and
references. What is a series and what is a multivolume work in
particular. I remember when I was doing some work for the Metropolitan
Mus. of Art, there are two huge series/works on Flemish art of the 15th
or 16th cent, one in Flemish, one in French, and we went crazy keeping
track of titles, vol. numbers, and style of citation. (The titles alone
were practically book length, esp. in Flemish.) And DON'T get me started
on spelling and grammar checkers or thesauri (I never install the last
two).
Patricia