Allan Needell, Dept. of Space History, Nat'l Air & Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution, MRC 311, Washington, DC 20560
i: nassh100@sivm.si.edu; b: nassh100@sivm; CServe: 71461,1115
tel 202/357-2828; fax 202/786-2947
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
To: NOTABENE--CMSNAMES notabene list
From: Allan Needell
Subject: Wordport 5.2 (NB4 to Xy4)
For any who might be interested, yesterday I used the new WordPort 5.2
to convert an entire book manuscript (Modified CMS, footnotes each
chapter, Chapter titles, Heads and 2 levels of subheads) from NB 4 to
xy4 to see how it looked using XYWIN.
I note the following. By and large the transfer was clean. It was not
perfect, but--except as noted below--required minimal clean up.
Minor problems:
As I mentioned before, my RHA deltas did not transfer properly. The A in
RHA was interpreted as a character, setting off a chain reaction of
improper nesting of format commands. The Running Header delta in XYWIN
was easily edited in expanded mode, so it caused not real problem.
The NB FS and FW deltas did not transfer. Instead they were executed as
text at the top of each chapter (i.e. there is a one inch line followed
by a margin to margin line at the top of each chapter document). The
lines are easily erased. XYWIN can insert FS and FW deltas very easily.
The prompt at the beginning of the NB document that identifies the
manual style was brought over to XYWIN as text. I simply erased it.
More major is the following BUG/Feature.
Instead of translating the NB footnote format delta (FMn) into a XYWIN
FM delta, Wordport inserted separate formatting commands at the
beginning of EACH note.I should note that it did this very well. The
WYSIWYG diplay and a sample printout look absolutely perfect. But it is
not the best way to format notes in XYWIN (as it wouldn't be in NB). I
haven't tackled the clean up routing. Inserting a XYWIN FMn delta is
easy, globally removing the individual format deltas from the notes may
take a bit of work.
I can see what happened here. Wordport translates from NB to a standard
platform, and then to the destination format. Since most other programs
do not have a global FM command, it had to be sacrificed for generality.
The good news is that if TTG decides to contract with ACI for a NB to XY
filter, this problem is easy to get rid of. I hope they do, and add to
xyWIN a number of Manual styles based on NB.
Allan Needell, Dept. of Space History, Nat'l Air & Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution, MRC 311, Washington, DC 20560
i: nassh100@sivm.si.edu; b: nassh100@sivm; CServe: 71461,1115
tel 202/357-2828; fax 202/786-2947