Dot Porter wrote:

> 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.

Nota Bene was an Israeli PC-DOS program supposedly specially suited to
scholarly needs, and was once intensely advocated by some enthusiastic IT
advisers (the closer you were to mid 1980s Exeter UK, the stronger the
enthusiasm rays tended to be) and even actually used by some scholars,
though I never personally met any who persevered with it for very long. It
was better than, say, Word Perfect 2 (or was it 3 by then?) or the abysmal
WordStar in that it had multiple buffers and windows a la emacs and Perfect
Writer, and good support for those funny "special characters" like e acute
that we were all so thrilled to be able to actually see on screen in those
days (but then so did Word 2 for DOS, which as far as I could see did
everything that NB was vaunted for doing, and did it in my view (then and
now), rather better and with much less risk of committing one's data to an
ephemeral internal format supported by one small company a long way away).

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.

It does, of course, have a plain text save mode (and I think it also
supported an early version of rtf, though I can't be sure about that: I have
a copy in my disk archives, but on a 5.25 inch floppy (yes, just one, 256K
capacity, ah those were the days) and I've no readily accessible hardware
capable of reading that medium (if it has indeed escaped byte rot). If 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.

Michael Beddow