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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