Waking up

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Robert wrote: "everybody has to shell out hundreds of dollars for a WP
they don't intend to use."
Not necessarily hundreds. Works Suite, which includes Weird, goes for
under $100; in the back of my latest Computer Shopper, a place
called BuyCheapSoftware carries the 2003 version for $69, and if you can
live with an an older version, you can probably get it for less. The real
question is whether you want to have another MS virus on your system.
(We're not the only ones to think that: at a recent meeting I was talking
to a fellow editor, whose tech guy had said to him, "The biggest virus
around is Windows.")
	By the bye, WordPerfect opens older versions of Weird better than recent
versions of Wierd do. But it does mess up some formatting: I recently had
to open a Wierd doc at the office in WP, and some centered copy came over
all padded with spaces. On the other hand, I just converted a Xy file,
rather heavily formatted, to RTF, using the Hungarian filters, then
opened it in Wierd before sending it to the colleague, and apart from the
apostrophes (which nothing ever gets right), it was OK.
	As I think someone mentioned, RTF is better when converting from Xy,
because the Hungarian filters produce an older version of Weird that
Weird itself sometimes chokes on. And if M$ is thinking of abandoning
RTF, it may be that they'll move to HT/XML. That might be a Good Thing.
It's a bit more comprehensible than RTF. And the other day, while
rummaging around in the latest Mozilla version (looking for some
documentation that wasn't there), I stumbled upon a whole list of XML
character coding that could form the basis of a nice CI routine. It's
some 8 K. Anybody like a copy or should I just post it?
Patricia