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Let's face it: DOS XyWrite is badly dated. New word-processing
applications and modern editors are very good. New hardware has made
the Xy speed advantage a non-issue. DOS XyWrite is crippled by its
memory architecture, it would need a rewrite and a port to 64-bit.
And, indeed, it has one, albeit a very complex and specialized,
namely NotaBene 10. I tried this recently, and found that it is a
very capable and sleek program. But still, it is not for everyone.
It is a good academic word-processing program for humanities
scholars (of a certain affinity, namely biblical scholars, etc.),
not a general-purpose editor like DOS XyWrite or NB 3's main editor
component. I was lost in a myriad of features that I have no use
for. And there are reasons not to use it in the academic world, too,
as becomes apparent in what follows. This outburst (http://osdir.com/ml/text.tei.general/2006-02/msg00085.html) is somewhat disparaging, but sadly I find that the conclusion has some truth in it: "> Up until now she's been using Nota Bene I fear sudden transition from Nota Bene to Oxygen might result in terminal shock. And I don't mean static discharge from the keyboard. [...] None of the specific skills relevant to using it have any application at all to modern text editing or XML document authoring, except that it does inculcate the mercifully somewhat transferable skill of pressing a key on the keyboard and observing how the corresponding character, if the Gods and Mr Gates are willing, appears on the screen at the cursor position. Oh, and yes: pressing the arrow keys tends to move the cursor in the direction the arrows point, at least some of the time. Otherwise, nothing one needs to learn or know to use NB carries over usefully into the 21st century. [...] [DOS NB] also has a Word-Perfect-type "show formatting codes" mode, and your user could if she wished exploit that to search and replace italic, bold etc formatting into pointy-bracketty basic markup before doing a text mode save. But once that's done, it's time to bid that particular package a fond, and I would say long overdue, goodbye." So it is suggested that the solution is XML and an editor like OXygen, which is indeed capable of many things, even editing XML in a word-processing mode. http://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_author/wysiwyg_xml_editor_structured_editing.html This editor is used by big publishing houses and academic organizations that have switched to XML-based document systems. The price tag is steep, and the product is perhaps too powerful for many users. There are free alternatives that can edit XML, normal text editors like Notepad++ and free XML editors like foxe (http://www.firstobject.com/dn_editor.htm), which gives the opportunity to edit individual content nodes without messing around with the XML codes. I went on to review some other alternatives, editors with an integrated coding component. I tried to find two-view editors like XyWrite. I stumbled on Kenneth Brooks' dissertation on the subject (http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-33.pdf) as well as modern developments like Lyx (http://www.lyx.org/), TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html), TeXmaker (http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/) and TeXstudio (http://texstudio.sourceforge.net/). These editors are free alternatives that the scientific community widely uses. Maybe they could serve as a basis for a modern port of XyWrite. There are success stories of this kind. One that comes to my mind is DOS Clipper which has evolved into Harbour. The full power of the language has been released without memory limitations. Lyx is particularly interesting in the way it handles formatting on the fly, changing codes into Wysiwyg. As of now, I am stuck with NB3 (essentially Xy3). I am not happy with the memory handling. In vDos I cannot get good performance with multimegabyte files that I deal with. The difference between VirtualPC 2007 and vDos is one to sixteen when jumping to eof with a 3 MB file. This rules vDos out from my production use. VirtualPC 2007 is not fully integrated into Win7 (the mouse must be manually released from the DOS session) and there are fears that in Win10 VirtualPC 2007 will stop working. This is something of a dead end. Most of us are on 64-bit systems which do not handle 16-bit applications at all on the operating system level. Xy should move to 64-bit. I find myself editing Xy files with modern editors like EditPad. While this is feasible, they are not as efficient with complex formatting and editing. There is a place for a simple 64-bit XyWrite editor. It could be perhaps be extracted from NB10, if the NotaBene company would release the source code of the basic editor component (not the NB-specific frills of it), but I doubt they be willing to try this. Nevertheless, this could be a smart move: open-source projects flourish and can be a boon to a small developer. If this does not happen, then there is the general open-source editor community. I have a dream of a Xy3 and Xy4-compatible simple editor with collapsible formatting and perhaps with user-definable formatting codes, so one could change «MBRV» to «MDIT», «MD+IT» or perhaps to <I> at will. It should have full customizable Xy keyboard file support. The simple Xy3 codes have been very useful when converting to other formats for desktop publishing and the Net. In my opinion, XyWrite should have been developed into a back-end editor of desktop publishing and content production systems instead of trying to be a generalist word processor. NB 10 is not generalist, but it is too refined to be of much use to the general Xy crowd (if there still is such a thing). Best regards, Kari Eveli LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland) lexitec@xxxxxxxx *** Lexitec Online *** Lexitec in English: http://www.lexitec.fi/english.html Home page in Finnish: http://www.lexitec.fi/ |