No soft hyphen???

[Elbrecht]

Good point Geoff -

Nisus Writer hopefully doesn't end up once again as an empty container of dropped Apple technology...

HE

[Groucho]

All too true. I had come to the same conclusion. When I upgraded to 10.6 I was wondering whether my old applications were going to work no more, but I had the surprise that they were still working under Rosetta and that many of the bugs which I thought were the app’s had disappeared overnight. Many of the glitches and shortcomings belonged to Apple, not the applications.

Nonetheless, I am still loath to further upgrade. I don’t know what the future will bring about. Because of the iThingies, perhaps, Apple is becoming abstracted, if not an unknown quantity.

Henry.

[greenmorpher]

Groucho sez:

Many of the glitches and shortcomings belonged to Apple, not the applications.

Nonetheless, I am still loath to further upgrade. I don’t know what the future will bring about.

It's true. Moving up fropm X.6.1 to X.6.2 I lost Personal Orgaziner 4.5, just won't launch now -- who fiddled with what? -- and I thought I had lost Eudora -- again someone fiddled -- but it turns out Eudora runs fine provided you change the alarm sounds from the Eudora sounds to system sounds. Between X.6.1 and X.6.2, Apple dropped recognition of the old Eudora sounds format.

I wonder how much energy the Nisus team has to put into changing stuff to accommodate OS X changes as distinct from developing Nisus Writer.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

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[Kino]

About soft hyphen issues, I wrote all I know two years ago in these postings.
http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14101#p14101
http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14105#p14105
http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14227#p14227

To sum up…

• With “Allow Hyphenation” turned on, most likely you will want to disable hyphenation in some places, especially when writing in no-US English languages. Even for US English, the hyphenation dictionary is know to be buggy for many words¹. So you may want to have the ability to insert zero-width joiner too.
1. http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb13-4/tb37hyf.pdf

• The most convenient way to insert soft hyphen and zero-width joiner would be to define them as Cocoa keybindings² so that [a] you can use them not only in NWP but also in all Cocoa applications including Nisus Writer Express ;-) and you can insert them not only in the edit window but also in the Find panel.
2. http://www2.odn.ne.jp/alt-quinon/files/ ... KBdict.zip

The last ability is important: if you cannot type them in the Find field (and unless you are familiar with their Unicode code points and PowerFind Pro), it will be difficult to find soft hyphens (invisible except at the end of physical lines) and zero-width joiners (always invisible when “Show Invisibles” is turned off).

If you don’t like to install a keybinding dictionary and prefer a macro solution. There is a way to make it work in the Find panel too. Instead of “Type Text”, use a new command available since NWP 1.3: “Send Text”.

Code: Select all

Send Text "\xAD"  # insert soft hyphen

Code: Select all

Send Text "\x200D"  # insert zero-width joiner

[Groucho]

This macro will zap all soft-hyphens in a selection, if any, throughout the document if nothing is selected.

Code: Select all

This macro deletes all soft-hyphens in a selection. If nothing is selected, the whole document is scanned.

$Opt = 'aE'
$sel = TextSelection.active

if $sel.length
	$Opt = 'asE'
end

Find and Replace '[\x­AD]', '', $Opt

Henry