Jumping ship

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Paul Breeze wrote: "Sadly, it seems to me that the time has come to
consider whether anything might be gained by switching to either Word or
Wordperfect" Well, I have had to use both for various things, and I have
to say Word is torture and WordImPerfect is just that--imperfect. If one
had never known XyWrite, one might think WP a decent enough app, and for
some things it is quite adequate. At least it lets you SEE formatting.
But autonumbering is a disaster. (By the by, vers. 8 was vers. 8; 2000 is
vers. 9, and about the best of the bunch. 2002/vers 10 is quite buggy.
And one of the good things about 2000 is an enormous supply of TrueType
fonts you get with it.) It isn't even just the lack of keyboard control;
it's the things you just cannot do at all yet can do so easily in Xy. I
had more or less kept Xy for writing things that I would distribute in
plain vanilla printouts, simply because I didn't have the Hungarian
filters and so had difficulty exporting. Now that I have those filters,
thanks to this list, plus the German PDF-creating utility, I hardly use
the others except when a client insists or, in the case of WP, where I
have a whole slew of templates all made (e.g., for my invoices) or for
labels, where WP is really good.
	Anyone considering Word should also realize that M$ is planning to end
even the limited "sale" of its software. Future releases will have to be
"upgraded" after Redmond thinks you've used them long enough, and will
stop working if you don't upgrade. (This is not just my M$ prejudice:
it's been discussed in reputable computer publications.)
	Of course, I have the good fortune not to need bleeding edge hardware
for anything, so upgrading is not a necessity for me. But even if it
were, I think there are decided advantages to having two systems ("poor
man's multitasking" I called it back in DOS days), though heaven knows
desk space is an issue. You realize that if you used an older system just
for XyDOS you wouldn't even need to load Win9x: both 95 and 98 permit
using just the DOS (7.x) that underlies them.
Patricia