Basic drawing tools for Nisus Writer

[Alastair Nisbet]

Been looking for the draw tools to add a line or a box to your document?

So have I.

Sadly they are not there

I know you can paste an inline graphic into documents, but who wants to leave Nisus just to draw a line and pase it in ?

Surely the ability to draw lines and basic shapes is the most obvious missing feature?

Please think about adding it!

[Phil82]

Nope, don't really need them.

I think a word processor should really be just that. A word processor. The ability to make a horizontal rule could be handy, but I'm certainly against full fledge drawing, a la Word. For that, there are better programs to use out there, like Omnigraffle.

[MacSailor]

Nope, don't really need them.

I think a word processor should really be just that. A word processor. The ability to make a horizontal rule could be handy, but I'm certainly against full fledge drawing, a la Word. For that, there are better programs to use out there, like Omnigraffle.

Agree on this one. Let the word processor stay as a word processor and use whatever application you need to do other things. Can recommend OmniGraffle as well.

[mrennie]

Another naysayer here. There are a couple of high priority issues that Nisus needs to deal with, but I've never considered drawing tools to be one of them. I highly doubt that I'd give up on OmniGraffle anyway, especially since LinkBack makes it so easy to efficiently combine both applications. I wouldn't mind being able to insert simple horizontal lines, or better yet, being able to add frame lines around text paragraphs, as part of a paragraph style; but actually drawing lines and shapes, no, I wouldn't want that. It would take a lot of time and effort to get it right, and I'd rather see the Nisus folks spend their resources on adding actual word processor features like widow/orphan control and the creation of tables of contents.

Speaking of which: there are a number of threads in here about what we want Nisus Writer Express 3 to be like, which features we'd like to see and so on. Nisus folks, any news on the product? Will we see a beta at some point in the not-too-distant future? Please, please, please!

[steintal]

To create a simple box you can use the table tool and set columns and raws to value 1. Later you can enlarge this box if you like, you can fill it with text or an image ...

[mrennie]

Thank you, but I've tried that before. It's okay for a single text box, but I'd much rather have borders as part of a paragraph style. Say for instance you want every heading in your document to have a frame; creating a table on every single occasion would be extremely tiresome. Right now, I'm using tab leads as a workaround, as it allows me to create a small horizontal line that's part of the heading style, which is not too bad, I guess.

But it's not really on top of my wish list anyway, and it doesn't really belong here, as such a thing would be different from actual drawing tools, or so I think. Thanks again for your suggestion.

[Ryan]

Naw. I just want to write.

That said, I think it would be useful, and might solve your issue, to have fancier style controls along the lines of CSS. Y'know, borders on styles, background colors, background images, and the like.

[joao]

I agree with Ryan. While I don't need a full set of drawing tools, some basics would be really helpful, plus the ability to make borders, text boxes and be able to caption images.

[midwinter]

Isn't this the point of linkback with something like OmniGraffle?

[joao]

Yes and no. While it's possible to import some content from Omni Graffle and LinkBack is good for that, having some built-in graphics capabilities allows for an ease of use and unified look (especially when adding borders, lines and captions) that would be a bit time-consuming by only relying on OmniGraffle.

The ability to add frames, borders, labels and captions from directly within the program would make it easier to use. That veers a little bit more in the DTP direction than straight word-processing, but I frequently need such features without wanting to resort to using a dedicated DTP program to do so.

[JBL]

I guess some basic drawing tools would be good for things like borders; however, I think getting text to wrap around pictures pasted in from OmniGraffle is a higher priority. In fact, there are a bunch of things I think are higher priority than any graphics, like being able to script Find and Replace, and being able to include text attributes in a search.

[marc]

FWIW I come out on the negative side on this one -- I'd much rather see the app more deeply support image file formats in its existing functionality, than see development effort spent on drawing tools that are already well serviced on the Mac (inc. free tools for basic stuff.)

The app could (and should!) make it easy to use external files as list bullets, table col/row/contents/borders/backgrounds, section borders/backgrounds, associating images with para/char styles etc.

Not to mention the absolute first requirement, image wrapping!

Basically, I'd like to see all of the ways that images could be used in 'traditional' (read 'old skool'!) word processing, before seeing any built-in drawing tools.

Sorry to put a wet blanket on the request, but there is so much that could be achieved with these capabilities, vs. adding drawing tools... IMHO.

[xiamenese]

As a long time fan of both NWE and OmniGraffle and fully paid-up user of both--and so someone for whom LinkBack is the bees knees--for any drawing as such I will always use OG and LinkBack, and very much look forward to the day when NWE will be able to flow text round graphics. But on the other hand, I do frequently wish I could produce simple lines as separators between paragraphs or boxes around paragraphs.

Yes, one can produce a simple line in OG and paste it in, but that's a bit of a pain; and yes one can produce a one-cell table with a border, but that too is a bit of a production ...

So I would support the availability within NWE of lines and boxes, perhaps with very basic fills, but no more.

Mark