Rock Solid v. Silly To: xywrite

[chet.gottfried@xxxxxxxx]

K.,

At some point along the way, you stated to the effect that
XyWin is/was rock solid. I was just wondering when this was going
to happen.

For the present, XyWin behaves like a DOS product trying to sneak
into Windows. The unfortunate Bitstream Speedo fonts may be a
"nonissue" but XyWin can't work properly without them.
Setting uwf to 3 (or 2) indeed hides Speedo but also cancels the
graphics view, so that one is left with the accursed systems
font, not to mention a nonprinting version of XyWin.

Sure, the Windows printers still register and can be selected;
but printing generates an error message. For that matter uwf
generates a sequence of errors: "Printer setup error; no printer
device; no XyWrite printer file loaded; and printing disabled."
Can you name another Win product that can't use the
Win printing?

This would suggest that Speedo is hardly a nonissue.

And while it is fun talking about future versions of a
programming language of XyWin (which may be 1 year or 10 years
away), wouldn't it be a good idea to start practicing documenting
what is already going on in XyWin?

Word processors, such as WordPerfect, that have developed very
thorough languages have also produced 1000-page manuals to
document them. If TTG has limited resources, it would seem that
such a book would be beyond its scope. And therefore, no matter
how successful a further implementation of XPL, it would once
again be largely undocumented.

Of course, you could always try throwing in a sample book on
XPL programming--just to give your staff practice in actually
documenting what it is doing.

If your staff did keep thorough records, perhaps little things
such as the buggy character selection menu could be fixed, rather
than drag on in never-never land.

I know it's a temptation to look toward a great and glowing
future, but I'd feel better if more attention were paid to
XyWin here and now, such as why ATM 3.01 and the "required"
Speedo fonts can't function together.

--Chet
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 ? SLMR 2.1a ? chet.gottfried@xxxxxxxx  or  chet@xxxxxxxx