XyWrite for Windows

["William A. Kretzschmar, Jr." billk@xxxxxxxx]

Mr. Frank:

I have used XyWrite for over 10 years for the purpose many users
need it: a clean, straightforward tool for technical
publication, in my case phonetic symbols for linguistic survey
research. Originally I made my own phonetic symbols mapped to
high ASCII codes, first for dot-matrix printers and then in a
Hewlett Packard soft font, because no commercially available
fonts contained the symbols that I needed. You can see examples
of my work in *Journal of English Linguistics*, produced for 10
years with these methods, or my *Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South
Atlantic States* (U of Chicago Press, 1993; produced entirely
with my methods, it is the most comprehensive example of phonetic
typography in its field). The marketplace has caught up now, and
TrueType fonts with the symbols I need are available, but I still
need to map the symbols to the same high ASCII codes in order to
retain compatibility with hundreds of megabytes of survey files
and to the code assignments that I have published for use by
others of my material.

After extensive discussion with tech support and with Jim
Jefferson in development, I have discovered that XyWrite for
Windows is simply not going to work with my remapped fonts: XW
automatically remaps ASCII codes of TrueType Windows fonts so
that I cannot use my phonetic symbols. This is a great pity!
I'll have to keep using my old HP soft fonts with XyWrite III+
or XyWrite 4, or switch to a different word processor.

What I would strongly encourage is the creation of something like a
XyWrite for Windows Lite. Such a product might cater to your
well-established base of technical publishing customers. You
could delete the special character set and perhaps other features
that might interfere with clean, straightforward production of copy. I understand that The
Technology Group must produce advanced, full-featured products if
it is to compete with WordPerfect and MSWord, but I also believe
that it is a bad idea to shut out existing loyal customers.
Perhaps this is a self-serving request, since I can't use what
you have, but I bet there are many others out there who have
parallel problems.

Regards, Bill
*****************************************************************
*************
Bill Kretzschmar         Phone:  706-542-2246 Dept. of
English (Park 317)   FAX:   706-542-2181
University of Georgia      Internet: billk@xxxxxxxx
Athens, GA 30602-6205      Atlas Web Page:
http://hyde.park.uga.edu