Xy-Word Conversion

["Thomas J Hawley" tjh@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Alison Tartt  on Sat, 08 Mar 2003
09:58:02 -0600

> When publishers give me Word files and of course expect to get Word files
> back, I simply use WordPort so I can do all my work in XyWrite (III+). No
> one is the wiser. Furthermore, the conversion process reveals garbage that
> can be cleaned up or deleted.

That assumes that the original Word file was not built with styles; if it was,
someone's going to have to re-style it when they get it back from you.

And of course, what's garbage to Xywrite is formatting data to Word, and vice
versa. Word documents are OLE 2.0 compatible multi-stream files, and the
binary format of these critters is complex beyond belief (the official
Microsoft description runs almost 200 pages, and it's really dense stuff.)

Converting once (say from Word to Xy, or Xy to Word) is certainly doable, but
"round-tripping" (Word-Xy-back to Word) can make the final Word version
unstable or possibly corrupt, depending on how complex the document was. Works
best for straightforward, no-frills documents.

Tom Hawley
New York
tjh@xxxxxxxx