Re: Nota Bene engine

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Mon, 21 Oct 1996, ... (adpFisher) wrote:

> ≪ Try going to the command line and typing
>  func wz
>  then hit enter. If you get a WYSIWYG screen, it's Xy4. ≫
> 		--Harry Binswanger
>
> ≪ It does nothing. No error message, but no menu. ≫ --Watts Martin
>
> I have it on good authority that the NB engine is xyW 3.34 with
> enhancements provided by Billerica.
>

Nope, NB3.0 was Xy3.54; I believe NB3.1 was Xy3.56; (I think) NB4.0 was
Xy3.57?, and (I think) all subsequent nb4.x are still that Xy version of
the editor portion of the code. The forthcoming NBWin will be based on
the current XyWin (4.16?) Promised date not disclosed, probably 2nd
quarter of next year(?) No one's planning the next book around its
availability...

As for enhancements, they come from all over the place. Steve Seibert
wrote a lot of them himself; he grafted FYI3000 for the TextBase (now
Orbis), and wrote XPL routines and overlays to handle bibliographic
cites. Ibid came in part from a now-defunct bibliographic program with
ties to (I think) the authors of Citation (from Oberon, recently merged
with NB), and even had some help from visiting Russian programmers who
worked on making Ibid work with Lingua (to handle Cyrillic, Greek,
Hebrew etc.) It that explanation sounds confused, it's because it's
pieced together from bits & snatches of information squirreled away over
several years and probably imperfectly remembered. Believe it in its
entirety at your own risk...


> ≪ By chance, I just ordered a copy online from amazon books.
>  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0830634592/7999-7613772-302613 ≫
>
> ≪ You'll probably get a message back, if you haven't already, that the
> book is out of print. (I tried that a few weeks ago!) ≫
>
> Unless the version number I just cited is a typo, the best of The Book
> would be wasted in NB, and I think Signature books (yes, Virginia,
> there's at least one, and Art Campbell's v4 macros book is a hasty revise
> of a Signature macros book) are more applicable to xyW 4. The best of "XR"
> is late xyW 3-specific.
>

The Book from The Herb is almost entirely applicable to NB, except for
some later NB enhancements that Tyson didn't know about (some
simple-minded, like RM now changed to TW for text width; others deep in
the overlay routines). Still a priceless resource, though Tony Woozley
has written a wonderful customization & programming guide for NB4
expanding on the less obvious stuff and explaining a lot Tyson left out
(and a lot not directly applicable to the diverging XY4). It's in the NB
archives (NB-CPG.ZIP) on Simtel mirror sites and ftp.coast.net
(/Simtel/msdos/notabene). Warning: it's long and meaty, though very
well-written. (Tony is a retired English professor who took up XPL for
fun after he retired 10 or 15 years ago.)

	--Dorothy Day

---
Dorothy Day			
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
day@xxxxxxxx