columns, footnotes

[Carlo Caballero ccaball@xxxxxxxx]

>
> From: Peter Evans 
......
>
> If I attempt to delete a vertical block [sorry I forget the official
> terminology] soon after starting up XyWin, the program will usually lock
> up. That is, if I press Alt-F1 for the start of the block and F1 for
> the end [both of these are Xy3 key assignments] and then Shift-F12 [a
> Xy4(Win) key], the cursor will stop blinking, XyWin won't respond, and
> (if I press Ctrl-Alt-Del), Win95 will say that it realizes XyWin isn't
> responding.
>

I've found that Xy3 locks up if the first action I take (besides calling
up a file and scrolling down) is to attempt to define a column table from
the TOP of the column. I've learned to avoid the problem by scrolling
past the column area and then backing up to define the column from the
bottom. Strange. For me, the situation seldom arises. It's worth
noting that this problem does not arise with snaking columns (SN), only
CT.

.....
>
> Irrelevantly (I suppose): I've long been moaning about XyWin's
> misplacing of footnotes (in particular, unnecessarily shunting them to
> the following page). Somebody from TTG [sorry I forget his name] kindly
> posted specific advice here. Two or three weeks went by without my
> needing to print out anything with footnotes. Then I did. Before
> looking up that message, I thought I'd first see how bad a mess XyWin
> had made when I used my regular (inappropriate) settings. No problem at
> all: whereas it usually got at least one note per page wrong, now it
> made not a single mistake.
>

I haven't experimented with XY4 or XYW for this one, but I do find that
XY3 will NOT treat footnotes properly if the PL setting (not used in those
later versions anyway) doesn't have enough "slack" between variables. The
following variables work:

nom. max. min.
54  60  50 (XY3 default)
58  62  54 (user E. Cray, I may have his name wrong...)
56  58  52 (my current setting)

However, the following setting (which I used for some time before wising
up) causes the notes to "fall off" the bottom of the page every once in a
while:

nom. max. min.
56  58  55

I concluded that the difference between the nominal and minimum values
must be GREATER THAN ONE: a difference of three works, and I suspect it's
the minimum difference. I wasn't ambitious enough to try testing with a
difference of two.


C. Caballero