REDLINING

[STEVE HAYES]

Hi Strat (and Dan Schaffer too),

I work in the editorial department of a large correspondence university (the
University of South Africa). We used Atex until four years ago. Our production
department still use if for typesetting etc., but the editorial department
switched to XyWrite in 1987. Because we work with academic texts, the lecturers
want to see exactly what changes have been made, and so we used Edit/Check in
Atex and redlining in XyWrite. We use the Grey Minus key as a toggle - press it
once, and redlining is on, press it again, and it's off. We use three modes -
bold, Roman and italic. We have Copam computers with intelligent mono cards
that show high resolution with 256 shades of amber (rather like mono VGA but
much cheaper) - this means we can show all modes on screen - we've created our
equivalents to mode of the Atex functions was well (e.g. screen notes). So our
different modes show bold, Roman, italic; bold inserted, Roman inserted, italic
inserted; bold deleted, Roman deleted, italic deleted (for non-Atex types,
"Roman" means MDNM). On the printouts we give lecturers, we print in Times
Roman 8pt on an HP Laserjet or Brother HL8e. Inserts are underlined, deletions
have a backslash through them (we'd love to do the shading for deletions, but
it doesn't seem to work with proportional fonts).

We've looked at ex post facto redlining programs, like Compare Write from
Jurisoft. It works well, but our editors like to see what they've done to a
text, and so do our reviewers. Programs like WordPerfect ONLY have redlining
afterwards, and can't show it character by character. We've been under pressure
from some lecturers to get Word Perfect - they want to be able to enter
formulas and the like on screen - but we say no, it can't do redlining. You
can't define a chunk of text, move it to another part of the sentence, and have
it instantly show up in redlining. You can't run a global change in redlining
in WordPerfect. Microsoft Word can do much of what we need, but only in
graphics mode. There's no doubt about it - XyWrite has the best redlining
available, and that makes it the best word processor for publishers.

I miss the autoreplace feature in 3.56 - someone said there was a workaround -
does anyone have details?

Steve Hayes Editorial Department University of South Africa Pretoria. Fidonet:
5:7101/20 Internet: Steve.Hayes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx