Spotlight and Nisus Writer Express

FAQ for Nisus Writer Express

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dave
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Spotlight and Nisus Writer Express

Post by dave »

Spotlight, Apple's new search tool in 10.4, is able to index native Nisus Writer Express documents. Apple has included several importers (plug-ins) for Spotlight, including RTF, Mail, JPEG, PDF and MP3. Since Nisus Writer Express's native file format is RTF, documents are easily indexed by the system without any modification by Nisus.

However, while Nisus Writer Express can open and save .doc files (MS Word's native file format), Spotlight will not index .doc files created by Express. This is because Express does not actually save binary .doc files. These are RTF files with a .doc file extension. Therefore, the Spotlight importer as currently written does not know how to interpret these files, and does not index them.

Express saves .doc files this way to keep things simple. Word sees these files are valid read/write documents.

The workaround is to save received .doc files as RTF. This will ensure compatibility, since just about every word processor can at least read RTF files.
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