Re: ersatz autosave

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to message of Paul Breeze  on Sat, 19
Feb 2005 15:01:09 GMT

≪I have been experiencing rather frequent hangs in XY4...I am editing a
document with rather a lot of footnotes. ≫

Aha! yes, the footnotes could very definitely (IMHO) be causing the
hangs. XyW appears to store footnotes in regions of memory that were
available in DOS but are not, or are in short supply, in Windows. I
recall someone's having problems printing them when using chain printing
(as have I). Have you tried breaking the doc up into smaller component
docs (say one per chapter)? One can, of course, split the footnotes off
into a separate file (there's a U2 routine to do it) BUT it is very, very
dangerous to do it until one is sure there will be no moving about of
blocks of text or adding or deleting of footnotes; otherwise the notes
and the numbers can get out of sync, and that is a _nighmare._ (I've
edited enough docs with that problem to know.)

Another possibility, if you're running 9x: boot into DOS and run XyW
there (i.e., without Windows loaded) and see if the hangs persist. They
may still, since I think the RAM area in question is often occupied by
the VGA driver, but it might be worth a try. I gather, however, that
booting to DOS is not an option under the NT flavors. I have been trying
to assemble enough old parts to put together a DOS box (a real hardware
one; I have most of the components), load Novell DOS and XyWrite, and use
it as a control on some of these problems. Not quite there yet.

Patricia M. Godfrey
PMGodfrey@xxxxxxxx