Re: SIGNATURE SUGGESTIONS

[PETER PETTO]

Thanks for your response early last week to my Signature suggestions &
concerns. Since that time I've been so busy using Signature, that I haven't
had time to respond with my comments. Hopefully you'll still be able to follow
the train of thought now.

1) The best way I've found to "see" what I'm working on onscreen
  is to switch to the ASCII printer and write in draft view/hide
  pagebreaks. This kills the offset, and keeps everything (unless
  there is a line with a lot of format triangles or [xxx]
  characters) onscreen. Using a monospaced typeface as you
  suggest is only practical in my case for single typeface
  documents. Switching printers seems a lot easier to me.

  However, I still advocate a "show/hide margins" toggle that
  would directly accomplish the goal of keeping everything
  onscreen in draft view. I believe that Dragonfly incorporates
  this feature in Nota Bene.

2) I have switched to Code Page 850 as you suggest, which
  eliminates the [xxx] characters in the 0-255 range. I still
  think it would be wonderful to be able to substitute a
  designated character for all [xxx]s, or to be able to substitute
  on a case by case basis. There are a lot of useful high-range
  [xxx] characters that make the draft mode screens look like
  gibberish.

  And worse yet, the spelling checker does not recognize the
  high-range [xxx] punctuation characters as just that. It is
  very frustrating to have every word adjacent to a double quote
  or an em-dash ([264],[265],[260]) flagged and shown to me as
  misspelled. Could you please refer this buglet to the hot list?

3) I misspoke when I asked for case-sensitive search and
  replace. I should have said case-preserving search and replace.
  That is, "cat" for "dog" - "Cat" for "Dog" -
"CAT" for "DOG" all
  by one command. I am looking at making the appropriate XPL to
  SPL changes to existing programs that will accomplish this. I'd
  only suggest that such a program be included in future Signature
  releases as a programming example that accomplishes a frequently
  desired editing action.

4) I may not have been clear with regard to my comment regarding
  dingbats as outline bullets. I have dingbats and do use them as
  bullets. I was just commenting that they cannot be used as the
  standard automatic outline bullets under the current
  setstyle/usestyle design. This is not a big problem for me. It
  is easy enough to program a key to call a style and then insert
  an explicit dingbat bullet character. However it would be nice
  to have these handled in the same way that bullets from the
  extended character set are.

Thanks for your responses. And thanks for passing my suggestions on to the
appropriate XyQuest channels.