Re: Sig vs. Xy4

["..." adpf@xxxxxxxx]

≪	One question: do I get a real XY4 manual if I upgrade from III+
to IV, or do I get a few notes only? It certainly sounds as if I need the
real manual. ≫

Paul Thornett: You get three or four manuals. v3->4 xpl porting issues,
however, are undocumented. The presumption seems to be that v3
programmers ported to Signature and resolved the not insignificant
incompatibilities then. Make no mistake: Souped-up Sig is still Sig. Son
of Sig is xyWrite in name only. Info relevant to xpl (none regarding
porting) is strewn through the manuals, poorly indexed, without
cross-references. References in the main manual are to key positions
rather than to functions by name, so to determine what function is being
described you must cf. a default.kbd on the screen. If your .kbd is
highly customized, prepare to spend at least days integrating v4 changes.

It's always *something* with v4. Decade after decade, study after
typographic study has shown that all-caps is far less readable than c/lc.
One of v4's countless gotchas is, on opening an existing file, it
converts code to (what else?) all caps, rendering xpl you know and love
as cryptic as machine language. Before I even started porting I had to
write a dumb macro that after edp ci's xpl to lc.

Some v4 improvements are indisputable--e.g., its grace with text blocks
and files whose size freaks v3. v4 uses expanded memory only (i.e., not
extended). Since it's the only app in my system that does, I never
rewrote my CONFIG.SYS to turn on expanded, and memory management compared
to v3 still is awesome.

Superior memory management is almost the only major thing v4 does that
defies a v3 workaround. But, as Joe Solla pointed out so eloquently, v3
does things v4 has no workaround for--like display smoothly. In my
system, a v4 session that terminates normally is a rarity. I have an
early release and assumed the display weirdness had been fixed till the
recent bug reports proved me wrong. v4's main selling point is the
graphical preview, but my software PostScript interpreter's screen driver
has given me a de facto graphical xyW 3 since before Signature--with no
screen font overhead. The v4 tradeoff for the preview apparently is
display flakiness.

v4 has better search and replace options, but you can get the same
effects with v3 xpl. v4 makes getting some chars onto the
CMline--especially carriage returns and linefeeds--lots easier, but
rejects CMline use of .kbd sequences that involve euroquotes, which I use
freely in v3 from .kbd in text or on the CMline.

The v4 BX function--a substitute for BC that eliminates the need for a
ldpm to park the CMline on a s/g to make way for other commands before
subsequently restoring it--is really nice, but v3 does have that
workaround. v4 also has several new variables that enhance xpl:
convenient but not life & death the way smooth display is.

Like yours, my v3 xpl is in long, complex files. Given v4's display
probs, slower feel, and the porting-in-the-dark hassles, I finally asked
myself what I was *doing*. Fucking nightmare is right. The only new
feature I really wanted from xyW 4 was an unlimited page length (like the
word processor I used in the mid-'80s). v4's is not unlimited but is much
longer than v3. But v4 introduces a page *width* limit where none had
been. v4 giveth and v4 taketh away. On the rare occasions when I need a
v4 feature that v3 lacks, I shell out from the v3 CMline. ... Ciao. 	--a

============================= adpFisher  nyc