Dear Victoria,
At my previous job at the Massachusetts Historical Society, we upgraded
from XMetaL 2.1 to XMetaL Author 4.0 a few years ago. Most of the
functions are very similar, but there were two issues that stood out for us.
First, in XMetaL version 4 and above, many of the functions that were
previously included in XMetaL were split off into various flavors of
XMetaL. For example, XMetaL 2.1 included a customization menu that allowed
you to edit the ctm and css files that controlled the custom encoding rules
(such as instructing XMetaL to always include a <p> tag when inserting a
<scopecontent> tag) and appearance in the tags-on and normal views (such as
giving all <did> tags a blue background for easy identification). In
XMetaL 4 and up these functions are not a part of XMetaL Author. You have
to purchase the additional XMetaL Developer for those menus, or try your
luck mucking about in ctm or css files by hand. There is yet another
flavor of XMetaL, the name of which escapes me, which does something else.
Another difference between 2.1 and 4 was character encoding. One of the
quirks of 2.1 is that when you save from the plain text view, it saves as
regular ascii with replacement codes for special characters. If you save
from the tags on view, it saves it, I believe, as unicode. In XMetaL 4 and
above, the program saves consistently as unicode, regardless of what view
you are in when you save.
Those are the differences that posed issues for me, but I am sure others
may have additional observations.
Best,
Mike
At 05:33 AM 5/25/2005, you wrote:
>Dear all
>
>Could anyone advise me on whether it is worth upgrading from XMetal 2.1 to a
>later version? If so, which is the best version to go for?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Victoria
>
>--
>Victoria Peters (Research Archivist)
>Glasgow University Archive Services
>77-87 Dumbarton Road, Glasgow G11 6PW, UK.
>Tel: +44 (0) 141-330-2992
>Fax: +44 (0) 141-330-4158
>E-mail: [log in to unmask]
>URL: http://www.gashe.ac.uk (GASHE Project)
>URL: http://www.archives.gla.ac.uk
>--
____________________________________
Michael Rush | [log in to unmask]
Processing Archivist / EAD Coordinator
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yale University
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Tel: (203) 432-8123 Fax: (203) 432-4047
|