nisus.com

martin wrote:

Ryan wrote:Huh. I like being quoted. I think.

hehe, are you denying the "total coolness that 2"?

Oh, heavens no! How could I say anything against that inimitable coolness that 2?

I wish the spam-bot that recently hit my webgallery's comment system had been as funny.

[quote]Sorry to take so long to reply. It's been almost 2 1/2 years since Express has been released, and we haven't charged for an upgrade. It will happen at some point, I would think, but I don't know when that will be. We haven't thought about pricing for 3.0 yet.[/quote]


I have paid for the 1.0 Version and now with NWE 2.5 I feel still like a beta tester (no TOC, no dokument navigation ...). I have to consider myself very strongly to by the 3.0 NWE!

multiple character shortcuts and a macroize function in F/R and faster handling of looooong documents in NWE3.

Thanks, Matze

I used "go to page ____" and "insert chapter #" constantly in Classic. Please please please add them to NWE!!! The first made navigating a doc so fast & easy...the second made adding/deleting chapters also fast & easy...I work with long docs & really miss these two!

Not sure if I (or others) mentioned this one.

I find split views (split windows) nearly indispensable.

Word, TAO and Ulysses has it. Great efficiency tool.

cheers

My pleas for 3.0 would be to be able to select fonts from the font menu by typing the first few letters of the font name. This is a great time saver if you know precisely which font you are looking for.

SteveH wrote:My pleas for 3.0 would be to be able to select fonts from the font menu by typing the first few letters of the font name. This is a great time saver if you know precisely which font you are looking for.

this is already working, at least with NWX 2.6 on Mac OS X 10.4.4 but I think it also was working with earlier versions of both.

this is already working, at least with NWX 2.6 on Mac OS X 10.4.4

Thanks for that. I see what you mean. I had never tried highlighting the font name and typing - what I was thinking more of the way a drop-down works in say a web browser.

SteveH wrote:

this is already working, at least with NWX 2.6 on Mac OS X 10.4.4

Thanks for that. I see what you mean. I had never tried highlighting the font name and typing - what I was thinking more of the way a drop-down works in say a web browser.

Perhaps you'd like something along the lines of the font menu that's in the tool drawer, under "Character"?

Here's some format options I really miss (from Word, natch):

• "All Caps" and "Small Caps" (as attributes, not through conversion)

• for paragraphs, "Keep With Next" and "Keep Lines Together"

• for Styles, a command to "Redefine Style Based On Selection" (this is huge for me; it feels so much more natural to modify a piece of text in context, on the page, and then "make these changes permanent for this style" once I like it ... rather than switching to an entirely separate styles editing area ... but perhaps that's just me!)

• An easy way to find & replace styles

Thanks!

The Document Map (aka Navigation Pane) feature from Word 2004, while executed with Microsoft's usual spectacular lack of grace, aesthetic taste, or basic respect for humanity, is GLORIOUS nevertheless. Working on long documents without this navigation aid seems really archaic now.

Along the same lines, the ability to insert nonprinting comments or sticky-notes into text -- executed pretty clumsily in Word, if you can believe it! -- is quite invaluable. They can either pop up (hello!) in little balloons when moused over, or appear in a separate vertical "notes area" outside the text margin (since we all have such wide displays these days). Preferably either/or.

Thanks!

I write academic books with catalogs, lists of figures and illustrations etc. I need a rich set of user-defined numbers, and a way of marking them and then inserting a reference to that number, a reference that will change as the numbers are updated. Nisus Writer Classic was great at this. The lack in Express of any such system makes it impossible for me to use this for more than an initial draft. For all kinds of technical writing I would think this would be a must. Mellel does user-defined numbers well with auto-titles, but I don't see a way of refering to those variable numbers, as you could in Nisus 6.5 with "Mark" and "Cross-reference". Any ideas on whether this might make it into 3.0 - or on alternative WP's?

I use NWE for Arabic word processing of contracts and other legal documents; primarily to create dual-column bilingual documents where English runs down the left side of the page and Arabic runs down the right. This is normally done using tables with each paragraph placed in a separate cell to force the English paragraphs to remain aligned with the corresponding Arabic paragraph.

Most of the time I need to collaborate on these documents with users of Microsoft Word. Against that background, here are three quirks of NWE that I'd love to see addressed in 3.0.

1) NWE does not allow cells in a table to break across pages. Therefore, if I have a long paragraph in the document NWE will insert a soft page break before it which sometimes leads to odd looking documents with lots of wasted space. Word has an option in the table properties menu of "allow row to break across pages" -- the option can be toggled on or off for specific rows which is extremely useful.

2) Apparently the RTL codes in NWE are different than the RTL codes in Microsoft Word for Windows. When I import an Arabic .doc file, the text directionality and alignment is "wrong" and I need to highlight the Arabic paragraphs and use the text-direction toggle to fix the formatting so I can read it and work with it in NWE. However, having done so, the directionality and right alignment will appear "wrong" if a Windows user re-opens the document in Word. (Interesting enough, the alignment and direction are preserved if I open the file in Word for Mac; the problem there is that Word for Mac does not support Unicode text so my Arabic text comes out as gibberish). The direction/alignment issue seriously hampers my ability to seamlessly collaborate on documents with Word for Windows users (unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the people I deal with).

3) NWE does not have a track changes feature or, better yet, an automatic "compare documents" feature analogous to the one built into Word. I am often called upon to generate a mark-up of a new document (say Version 3) that shows exactly how it is different from Version 2); compare documents would be a great help.

Even without these three features, I still find NWE to be a great program and extremely useful to me. However, without them, I wind up having to pass every bilingual document through Word for Windows for re-formatting and/or to run a track changes before I can email it along to a client.

Thanks,
DXB Law

And, of course, format painter - a great feature from Word that lets you easily copy all formatting attributes from one paragraph to a series of other paragraphs. That would be great too.

DXB Law wrote:And, of course, format painter - a great feature from Word that lets you easily copy all formatting attributes from one paragraph to a series of other paragraphs. That would be great too.

The new version, 2.7, has something like this, but it works at the character level, not the paragraph level.

--Craig