Richard's objections

[Eric Van Tassel 101233.342@xxxxxxxx]

Poor Mr Minutillo. We're such a mild-mannered lot, really (Clark Kent?), that
the responses to his calling us "hostile" seem to be more in sorrow -- or in
sympathy -- than in anger.

Like many users, I choose Xy4 for heavy editing and XyWin to print the results;
I use them because in the Xy environment I can control every aspect of what's
going on, a strength of no other word processor I've ever heard of.

When R.M. says "That is the market, by the way: word processing, not text
editing" he must be at least partly right. "The market" *is* important. My
brother has spent the last 30 years in software, working as (variously)
programmer and developer and marketer (and making a living that leaves me
stupefied with envy). Whenever I try to extoll the virtues of some program
(often XyWrite, but often something like Pine, whose simplicity -- now that I
can't use it in Compuserve -- makes me gnash my teeth at the "bells and
whistles" of Mosaic or Explorer or Netscape) he reminds me that there aren't
enough customers like me to make a difference. So I can't find anyone who will
tell me how to receive e-mail as plain-and-simply as I did a few years ago when
my "access provider" was not a giant CompuCorporation but a guy in his garage in
New Jersey.

But my brother and Mr Minutillo are only *partly* right. Among the relatively
small but high-standard book publishers I work for (mainly university presses),
several of those who are most efficiently capturing their authors' specialized
skills as *inputters* are using XyWrite do so, even though its virtues of "speed
and excellence as a text editor" (and its "obscure but powerful macro language"
-- though I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds that macro-writing in WinWord
is not only infinitely less "powerful" than XPL but also vastly *more*
"obscure") *don't* include "a lot of talk about typesetting".

Even though ... or because? The publishers' designers and production managers I
work with already *know* about typesetting, and they don't *want* the author and
editor to engage in "a lot of talk about typesetting": indeed, one of the main
drawbacks of WinWord is that it insidiously starts setting type when what you
*want* is to get on with editing. What my designers and production people do
want is for me to get the *text* -- with all its complications of multi-lingual
character sets, mathematical notation, etc. -- to them in an error-free form,
which *they* can instantly translate into an infinitely various range of
typesetting systems (systems which exist *solely* for "talk about typesetting"
and which in consequence do it a damn sight better than WordPerf or WWord).

Like many people on this list, I use XyW to turn any text, however complicated,
into simple (ad-hoc coded) low-ASCII text, which can be manipulated with a
minimum of instruction at the receiving end. This has nothing at all to do with
"academic material which is meant to be presented looking as if it were
'typed'".

Mr Minutillo does have a point, though: there's always a serious danger that a
product with a niche market will just go under. That's why I support the idea,
mentioned a few weeks ago, that the relatively small but absolutely committed
band of users who understand and value the strengths of XyW -- strengths that
are, admittedly, unsuited to "most of the general world of computer users out
there" -- might get together in a cooperative effort to keep XyW (that is, the
XyWrite *idea*) alive if/when its survival seriously threatened by its lack of
mass appeal.

I'm still looking forward to comments from Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins,
Yale, et al., and all the many newspapers that rely on XyWrite "out there".
Unless they're all too busy turning XyWritten text into type.

Cheers,
						Eric Van Tassel