text to cmd line/ascii to ansi/.Mac-Win blues

[Bill Troop bill@xxxxxxxx]

Help! I have the most hateful project imaginable.

Before I describe it any further, let me quickly
list my top requests:

1. What are the keyboard commands to copy or
move text to the command line? (and vice versa?)
I know I have them assigned somewhere in my kbd
file but I forget what they're called and where they are.

2. What is a foolproof method of complete conversion
from XyWrite ASCII to Win ANSI and back?

3. Any advice about conversion from MacASCII to
Win ANSI or DOS Ascii? Keeping in mind that the
text makes use of Mac ASCII characters like fi and
fl which must be translated into something in Windows/DOS
(the eventual idea being to deconstruct fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl
into their constituent letters for editing purposes).

OK. Here are the gory details.
A couple of years ago I wrote with Steve Anchell
the "Film Developing Cookbook". I worked in
XyWrite; he worked in WP, saving as DOS. I
needed to do this so I could use XyWrite's
wonderful compare feature to keep my co-author
honest. Then I took everything over to the Mac --
don't remember how anymore -- and got it into
PageMaker, using the font Miller, which includes
all five f-ligatures in "illegal" places. (i.e., fi and fl
are in their standard Mac places, ff is in the notequal
position, ffi is in the infinity position and ffl is in the
plusminus position -- this is the standard encoding
practice for all Font Bureau fonts, and believe me,
is the most rational solution out there so far.) (Thus,
any conversion routine I come up with must be
able to recognize not just Mac fi and Mac fl, but also
infinity, notequal, and plusminus, and be able to convert
them into their respective separate letters.)

Now we have to revise the book for a 2nd _edition_.
No problem, you say. Simply start with your XyWrite
files and everything will be fine. Not quite. There was
a second _printing_ of the book which I took advantage
of to make numerous corrections which were not
reflected in the XyWrite files, as I made them directly
in Pagemaker. Oh, woe! What stupidity!

I thus see no alternative but to use Pagemaker to export
the files as tagged text. But those files are hard to edit
because they're in MacASCII (or whatever the h you
call it). It all looks real ugly in XyWrite -- the en, em dashes,
the f ligatures -- I'm hoping I can write a simple
conversion program that will take care of it with a few
search/replaces, but am not sure that the weird graphics
characters that come up for fi/fl, for instance, will
translate properly.

I don't believe I can use Windows Pagemaker to export
the files, because I am afraid it would blank out fi and fl,
and heaven knows what it would do with the other
f-ligs.

Any advice will be appreciated. A key consideration is
that the files must eventually go back into Pagemaker
6.5/Mac. I will not be using Miller the next time, but a
similar font with similar encoding that I will be designing
myself over the next few months, unless I go crazy. Oh,
I forgot, I already am crazy -- and crazed. Thanks!