in response to Herb Gintis' message of 23 JAN 04

[Christina Thiele]

We the members of the Y&Y Technical Support group would like to
address the points made by Herb Gintis in his e-mail of 23 JAN 04.

Allow us to set the context for Y&Y, the company, which as you will
see, is in transition. We, the users, however, are not ;-) We continue
to need and provide support to one another because we continue to need
Y&YTeX and Y&Y fonts to do our jobs. And I think someone posted a
comment along the lines of `Well, if not Y&YTeX, what is there?'


Y&Y was jointly owned until 2002, when one of the partners, the
primary developer and technical support person, left the company. So,
yes, direct vendor support for Y&Y products (Y&YTeX, Y&Y fonts --
e.g. MathTime, Lucida) was seriously curtailed by the fall of 2002.

However, by February of 2003, the current forum had come into
existence. Support was no longer one-on-one, with highly customised
assistance. It no longer was the case that each user had to find out
for themselves how to fix something. It no longer was the case that
queries went unanswered (unless the person forgot to sign up to
techsupport, in order to get replies) for very long; granted, some
queries never did get replies, but as the months went by, response
times became much quicker, and more and more voices added their
information to help those in need. In short, we all benefit from one
another's experiences.


The traffic quickly showed how often the same problems arose -- and on
more than one occasion, users were chagrined to find the error had
been theirs. It's a fact of software life -- a lot of problems come
from not having read the documentation ... no matter how old or
recent, updated or outdated, clearly spelled out in bold letters or
not. Actually, it's not a problem confined to software either ... ;-)

Anyways. That's the bald truth about a good percentage of user queries
for help: user error. But in a one-on-one situation, users never get
that message, never see the pattern. On the other hand, techsupport
subscribers do! Yes, it's repetitive. And yes, it becomes frustrating
to see such messages again and again and again. But at least on
techsupport, we can warn colleagues about the more common
pitfalls. And make sure they know about the techsupport forum itself
-- where answers and explanations, quite frankly, are often far better
than the existing documentation ;-)


Then there's a second category of problems -- in our case, the
XP-specific ones -- which are related to the significant differences
that the OS itself presents, compared with the older ones one is often
used to. XP is just a very different fish. Backing out of mis-steps
(or just plain mistakes) is very difficult -- and there, the lack of
ongoing company-generated documentation and specific tricks for doing
so makes things seem worse.

We are all pretty much aware that Microsoft is in the business of
controlling all of the software on a system -- that is why _their_
systems seem to work so well: they're integrated. Which is also why
adding Microsoft products to a system tends to interfere with
independent software installs. Most of the weird problems with XP have
_nothing_ to do with Y&YTeX -- they have to do with Windows XP.


With respect to Herb Gintis, his name is well known to techsupport,
initially because he posted several questions (look back and you'll
see he's not a low-level TeX user either ... he's a developer
himself!) -- and I think more often than not found answers ... some of
them he found himself and then posted, for the benefit of everyone
else. And now, Herb's name most often turns up as the helpful voice
passing on those experiences to others. Which, by the way, proves why
having a techsupport forum for all users is far superior to one-on-one
consultations with the developer. Ideally, we want both. But we don't
have it just now.

The fact is, most software companies deal with exactly the same sorts
of problems every single day. But they don't discuss it with you in
detail. They don't like to give you more than 15 minutes of what often
seems like techno-babble. They don't put you in touch with others who
have had similar problems and solved them -- sometimes by quite
different means. Y&Y has always had a reputation for handling users
quickly and kindly -- until the hiatus of the fall of 2002.

At this moment, Y&YTeX v.2.3 has been developed but not yet
beta-tested; documentation updates based on 2.3 are awaiting that
testing. As well, the many issues raised here on techsupport need to
be addressed. It may well take all of 2004 to deal with it all.

The future of the company may not be sure, but the future of the
product is -- it's around to stay. And whatever decisions are made by
the company owner and the software developers -- I'm sure Y&YTeX users
will be kept informed. We all still have Y&YTeX, and use it and need
it. This forum is necessary for us to continue to do that. We get free
support, with no time limits, no-one asking for proof of purchase; no
techno-babble delivered at high speed so we can't hear half of it,
much less understand it. We find out a heck of a lot about stuff we
don't want to ;-) Or think we don't need to ;-) ... until a few months
down the road. And it's all out in the open.

So what we really need, in the end, is a tidying-up effort, as it were
of the current Y&YTeX. But that'll take time and money.

In the meantime, we have this forum, which lets us continue to deal
with problems -- ok, Herb ... granted, _after_ installation ;-) But
our collective knowledge level is way higher than it ever was, and we
each of us are now in a position to help newer Y&YTeX (or Y&Y font)
users to sort out their problems.

The product itself is not unstable, not defective. We can TeX our
files, and our files will TeX at other sites, on other platforms, just
as TeX promises. In short, the clothing may be looking a bit tatty,
but underneath it all, it's still a great implementation of TeX for
the PC. As for those tatty bits, the techsupport list probably has all
the necessary `patches' in some message or other ... ;-)

====

The initial draft of this response took shape last night, around 9pm,
when we first read Herb's message. It has taken considerable time and
e-mail today to discuss the issues, and come to a consensus on what
needed saying. We are committed to supporting Y&YTeX and its fonts
because it's the right thing to do for a good product.

Christina Thiele
Mimi Burbank
<For the Y&Y Volunteer Support Team>