Re: Pipe dreams

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

Interesting wish lists for a "Pipe Dream" word processor. But I wonder about
the point of the exercise. We already have a command-line word processor with
the option to use windows-like menus. In the Win version, you can even use
TrueType fonts and (till it crashes) drag art and frames around. It's sorta
cross-platform (the DOS version will run nicely in most Win, OS/2, and DOS
machines--do we really want Mac?). It's fast. It has a rich macro langugage.
What am I missing here?

I think there may be two motivations for wanting to roll our own versions:
-- We love to create things. Look at all the extensions, bells, and whistles
some of us have added. Why not a whole new word processor?
-- We've been mostly abandoned by TTG, and anything we want to do with XyWrite
is mostly up to us. The parents are gone and we kids have to fend for
ourselves.

TTG has a new kettle of fish to fry, and we're basically superfluous now.
Hence its dropping of some buggy features for SW rather than fixing them.
Hence long silences from Ken unless we tweak his beard or he is overtaken by
excesses of optimism. We dould imagine that from Ken's point of view, he
really does have more pressing and important things to do.

I'm not perfectly happy with XyWrite the way it is -- I'd like at least to
have TrueType support in the DOS version, and better graphics support in
either version. But I'm also aware of what an immense undertaking it is to
write, debug, rewrite, debug, document, optimize, debug, redocument.... any
program, and especially one that is as rich as XyWrite. So I'll continue to
use it as-is and tweak it with XPL till they pry it out of my cold, dead
hands.

Maybe somebody could write a Visual Basic routine that would put a command
line onto Word. Word runs nearly everything from some kind of macro language,
so we could have a command-line front end for Word that would slow it down
even more! ;-)

Or we could just feel lucky that the only remaining command-line word
processor is also the best.

Tim Baehr