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Re: Beginner's question + Euroscript. + Edward Mendelson



Dear Mr. Tzrok
 
There are many reasons I type in xy.  It is  much faster than wordperfect, ie in a 100,000 word document I can do a search and replace involving several hundred changes almost instantly as against a minute or two in word perfect.  You can go from one end of a document to the other instantly. It has a string expander which wordperfect does not. I like the spell checker in xywrite.  It is much faster to change between the two left margins that I use and also to change line spacing, I do not have to go through as many layers of menus for many functions.  Using the string expander I can insert formating without having to use menus.  
 
I still have word for word on my hard drive so it almost automatic for me to convert a xywrite file to wordperfect so I do not find it burdensome to use wordperfect for printing and xy for typing and editing. 
 
Another big advantage of xy is the xylist.  I have found over the years that the members of the list are extremely knowledgeable about many things and not just xy and are happy to share their experience and expertise and quick to respond to a call for help.  There are several grammarians and linguists and philosopy and literature professors. 
 
The only significant advantage of wordperfect for typing that I find is the simplicity of the help menu.
 
I think I may have used pagemaker or a similar program about twenty years ago, but wordperfect suited my purposes so I never bothered with a desktop publisher 
 
Where are you located.  If you write me directly via email I think I can help you to get a copy of wordperfect 5.1 for dos if you want to try it. 
 
--- Original Message -----
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx href="xywrite@xxxxxxxxxywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2010 3:31 PM
Subject: Re: Beginner's question + Euroscript. + Edward Mendelson

Dear Mr. Fischer,

Thank you very kindly: You may actually have provided the decisive piece of information I have desparately been looking for!
A neat format that passes Court won't fail the standards of the jury I myself will have to meet. I also use the Times font (and still have a Laserjet 5 in the basement).

Two questions: 1. Is there a reason why you type your documents in Xy and then convert them to Wordperfect? Wouldn't just doing everything Wordperfect be the simplest solution and - at least for our purpos - make Xy superflous?   2. Is Wordperfect 5.1 actually still available at all? For correct hypenation and spellcheck, I'd probably need to get hold of the German version. 

Trying this Wordperfect-option would highly interest me!

The incredibly helpful user "flash" (who has been giving me premium online assistance the past two days - Thank you again, flash!!)  has suggested to convert the xyfiles into Pagemaker. Do you happen to have tried that as well and could say something about how the quality compares to the Wordperfect-solution?

Thank you again and Kind regards!
L






From: Avrom Fischer
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Wed, November 3, 2010 5:40:59 PM
Subject: Re: Beginner's question + Euroscript. + Edward Mendelson

I am not qualified to comment on the ability to print documents for academic formats or other formats that have high technical requirements, but I have experience as lawyer submitting papers to Court where I am very concerned about the appearance of my papers.  I found that Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS gives extremely neat, beautifully kerned and spaced professional document.  Some years ago (I think about 2000) I had correspondence with Professor Edward Mendelson, the literature professor at Columbia who is the WordPerfect Guru and the author of many of the word processor reviews in PC magazine in the 1980's and other computer related journals and web sites (who had given Xywrite very strong reviews)  He had strongly recommended (and still does) using Wordperfect 5.1 for Dos long after Word for Windows had taken over the typing world for its ability to create beautiful looking documents.  I still do all my writing in Xywite 4.17 and than use Word for Word (a very easy and simple process) to convert the document to Wordperfect 5.1 which I than print in new times roman on an hp laserjet 5.   One word of caution, I only use two margin sets and I rarely use any font other than new times roman so I have very little tweaking to do afterwards so my idea of a simple and easy conversion may not be relevant to anyone else.  But I can strongly recommend wordperfect 5.1 for dos if your primary concern is the appearance of your document from the point of view of kearning, line spacing, spacing between words and between letters in a word.  It does have the abiliity to create numerous special characters in several widely diverse fields from literature to science to math to economics.
 
His website http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/ href="http://www.columbia.edu/%7Eem36/wpdos/; target=_blank>http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/ is a marvelous resource if you cannot get help here with running old dos programs in a window environment.
 
At various times the gurus on the Xylist have cited Professor Mendelson for recommendations for solutions to Window problems.
 
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