Re: Back-patting

["Harrison, Shawn" shawn_harrison@xxxxxxxx]

>I think it would be great to hear of other things being done with
XyWrite,
>pedestrian or exotic.

O.k., here goes. Whether this is pedestrian or exotic, you tell me. But
it also gets in the self-introduction which I neglected to contribute a
couple of months ago when I joined the list.

My employer is a publisher of Bibles and Christian books. I work with the
Bible daily. My job is to write and edit notes which go into Bibles, and
to edit books which are related to the Bible.

We have the Bible text that we use in most of our projects online. One of
my colleagues (Timothy Olson, our talented technical assistant) developed
a XyWrite macro which, at the touch of a key, would go into the Bible
text and find a reference -- takes about 0.1 second. We later extended
that macro so that the macro would go into the Bible text, pull out a
verse or block of verses, and insert it at the cursor in the current
document. Takes about 0.2 second. It has saved me oodles of time.

I later had a project where I had to organize Bible references topically.
Rather than flipping through the database or the paper version by hand, I
decided just to type as many references as possible for each topic. For
each topic, after collecting references, I would sort them and remove
duplicates. I wrote a short macro which reads the list and, for each
reference, runs the search and insert macro, until the end of the list. I
would run this macro on my list, and BANG! thirty pages of references, in
order, with no duplication. Takes about 5 seconds for 300 references.
Then I would format and print the document and make decisions about each
reference, whether it was appropriate, etc. I did approximately 80 topics
this way. Using XyWrite for this project saved me easily a couple hundred
hours of work; my efforts were limited to (1) collecting references and
(2) making decisions about the results. I did not have to flip through a
physical or electronic book for each reference, nor did I have to type
the text of each reference, which was used in the publication. XyWrite
did the mechanical grunt work; I was free to think.

Oh, by the way (and I think you will all enjoy this). Timothy Olson
developed a similar search and replace macro for MS Word (6.0), since
some of our people are migrating to it. He also wrote a routine to insert
text from the database into a list of references. I'll admit, it has a
nicer interface, with attractive dialogue boxes, etc. But what would take
XyWrite 10-20 seconds takes Word approximately 10-20 minutes, or longer.
Yikes! And MIS wants us to switch to Word for our editing? You've got to
be kidding. MS Word seems consistently to be an order of magnitude slower
than XyWrite for routine editing functions.

============================
Shawn Harrison
Associate Editor
Tyndale House Publishers
shawn_harrison@xxxxxxxx
============================
"The legal system is not fun, but it *is* an improvement
over duels and feuds." --Harvey Harrison, attorney