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I dunno...

Posted: 2007-07-06 22:04:41
by soulbarn
To each his own, I suppose if you need the features that Pro offers, it is worth the money. I don't, so $45 feels ultra-steep for an upgrade.

But my real question is why no outlining? This has been a requested feature for something like ten years!!!!

Is there a specific reason this never show up?

other than that, Express rules. I've converted several of my colleagues.

Posted: 2007-07-07 01:44:37
by greenmorpher
Hello Soulo

I have campaigned for a true outliner as part of NW for years -- with what we have now, I think we are pretty close. Let me explain ...

You can't expand and collapse, but you can still make a pretty good outline. Viz:

Set up a series of Paragraph Styles for headings. These incorporate both the "Headlings" from the Lists palette to get the numbering, indents, different types, sizes and styles, etc. PLUS Table of Content level AND a body text style as "Next Style". You assign it a keyboard short cut. I have my headings Styles called "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc., and naturally the keyboard shortcuts are option-command-1, option-command-2, etc.

Also set up a series of Paragraph Styles for body text. For me, these are all the same except that they have different left indents to match the head indents. These are based on my standard Body Text Entry Style, using Verdana 12 for easy viewing on screen. These are named Body 1, Body 2, etc. and each is the "Next Style" for the appropriate head. You don't need to give these Body Styles shortcuts, because they are invoked in your document as "Next Style" by their heads. You certainly do NOT give them Table of Contents recognition.

Now -- when working in your pseudo-outline mode, go Menu Bar > View > Show Navigator and a panel will open on the left side of your window.

Start writing. As you go, your headings appear in the Navigator because it is showing the Table of Content and you have designated all your heads for the ToC. You don't have expand or collapse, but you have a collapsed view available in your Navigator all the time.

You insert your first head "Heading 1" (option-command-1) then type. When you hit return, you move into "Next Style" which is "Body Text 1". As you continue to hit return for new paragraphs, you stay in that style.

Then you get to where you want to move into another head. If it is at the same level as the first, you just do your return out of the previous paragraph, do option-command-1, and you get another first level head which numbers itself "2". If you actually wanted a second level head there, you would hit option-command-2 and you would get a second level head which would designate itself -- in my cse -- "1.1"\, or "b" or whatever you had set up in the List styles. You type your new head, then return, and you get Body Text 1 style kicking in if you have made another first level head or Body Text 2 if you have a second level head.

And so on!

You can move aroujnd in the documnent by clickming on the items in the Table of Contants.

Now, you want to move a section? You have to select both the head and the following body text. No option but to drag down from the head to the end of the body attached to it.

Now, I have all these text sections set up in Verdana which, if you printed it, would likely make you chunder on the pages. You want to transform them into a nice printer font. For this purpose, you have a single Character Style (Character NOT Paragraph) with your type specifications for print set out -- e.g. mine are Adobe Caslon, 12 pt -- and name it. Mine is "Body Text Print". Okay -- you are ready. So you drop your cursor into a Body Text 1 Paragraph Style paragraph (i.e. text to come after first level heads), go down to the bottom of the Styles Palette, click on the gear wheel, and you see a command "Select All With Style" and ALL the Body Text 1 paragraphs will be selected. Now click on that Character Style, "Body Text Print" and they all transform into your selected print type while RETAINING their Paragraph Style characteristics and any individual type styling you have added, like italics.

Regarding the selection of whole sections; I have suggested to Nisus that while they are taking their time to work up true outlining, they could help us with the whole head + selection thing by giving us a selection option constrained by Paragraph Styles, so that if you set up your outline as I have suggested above, it would automatically select the whole section. The logic of such a selection tool would be:

Select the paragraph with the current Style PLUS any subsequent paragraphs which complied with the "Next Style" of the current Style. This would mean it could pick up a head plus the body dependent on it if the Styles were set up as per my scheme above, but selection would end when the Style changed to one which didn’t follow as a Next Style, i.e. when the next head was inserted.

Yes, it is not a dedicated outliner, but it is pretty useful.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

all things said

Posted: 2007-07-07 08:38:08
by gemboy27
Pro has features I don't need --- Express is good enough. that is for sure.


But for $45, I figure what the heck, the crew at Nisus works very hard on a forum that is not the official forum


Nisus disclaimer

I will use the TOC and maybe the index from time to time, but I don't need it, I do need to support Nisus

Posted: 2007-07-07 13:39:08
by soulbarn
Wow, Geoff - thanks for the very detailed and informative reply. I will try your method. I assume this applies to Express; do you think Pro- which has a new table of contents feature - would add any additional capabilties?

thanks again,

dan

Posted: 2007-07-07 14:23:33
by Talisman39
I bought NW Express a couple of years ago and felt it was a bargain price. I've been using the Pro Beta since it came out, and just downloaded the 1.0 version. I'm immediately going to pay for it. For me the features are well worth it, and I don't find $45 expensive at all for what it delivers.

To each his own.

With regards to the outlining functionality, unless it delivers close to the featureset and ease of use of Omni Outliner Pro, I'm not that interested. For my workflow I typically do the outline and then start writing, so it doesn't bother me that I have to work in two apps. I have to flip back and forth between outline and the "real" text anyway, it's actually easier to do this with cmd-tab than to be constantly scrolling back and forth in the document.

Having said that, Geoff's technique works well too, it is rather like the Hoist functionality in OO.

Adam

Posted: 2007-07-07 16:51:55
by greenmorpher
soulbarn wrote:Wow, Geoff - thanks for the very detailed and informative reply. I will try your method. I assume this applies to Express; do you think Pro- which has a new table of contents feature - would add any additional capabilties?
Yes it does, Soulo. The Styles driven thing I've done works fine in Express -- but it is enormously enhanced by the ToC and the Navigator window since that allows you to review your document in two levels of head form (level 1 heads or all heads) and to move around in it simply by selecting a head in the Navigator window. For any outline over more than a couple of pages, this is worth about 10x the value of petrified camel dung (and that's a very rare commodity indeed! :D )

If you would like me to send you my .dot file with all this set up so you can see exactly how it works, just drop me a note at marketingman13@yahoo.co.uk. Jsut note that I set mine up for the point system to operate, 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3; 2, 2.1, etc. Obviously, you can change that to use other systems in the Lists palette.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

Re: I dunno...

Posted: 2007-07-08 00:39:14
by dshan
soulbarn wrote:
But my real question is why no outlining? This has been a requested feature for something like ten years!!!!

Is there a specific reason this never show up?
I hope it's because Nisus see both NWX and NWP as wordprocessors. If you need outlines use an outliner.

The only way to stop Nisus turning into exactly the sort of bloated, complex, bug-ridden, (and expensive!) mess that Word personifies is to limit its functionality to what a wordprocessor represents. Avoid trying to jam in a grab bag of non-WP functions like outlining, graphics creation/manipulation, page layout, equation editing, etc. There are already many tools to do all these things, Nisus just need to ensure NWX/NWE works well with them when required.

The dream of one tool to rule them all is a delusion that will inevitably lead to a worse product full of weak "features" that can't compete with specialized tools that perform the same jobs better and more reliably. KISS and "Stick to Your Knitting" are the watchwords I hope Nisus will keep in mind as they add features to both NWX and NWP. So far it looks promising.

Re: I dunno...

Posted: 2007-07-08 02:08:11
by scottwhitlock
dshan wrote:
soulbarn wrote:
But my real question is why no outlining? This has been a requested feature for something like ten years!!!!

Is there a specific reason this never show up?
I hope it's because Nisus see both NWX and NWP as wordprocessors. If you need outlines use an outliner.

The only way to stop Nisus turning into exactly the sort of bloated, complex, bug-ridden, (and expensive!) mess that Word personifies is to limit its functionality to what a wordprocessor represents. Avoid trying to jam in a grab bag of non-WP functions like outlining, graphics creation/manipulation, page layout, equation editing, etc. There are already many tools to do all these things, Nisus just need to ensure NWX/NWE works well with them when required.
While I certainly agree that Nisus should be judicious in deciding on which features to put in and leave out (after all, does anyone REALLY need WordArt), I don't know if the "Keep Nisus as strictly a word processor" really holds up anymore. If it did, there would be no TOC, no crossreferencing, etc. in NWP and it would look more like BBEdit. Whether we like it or not, "word processor" has become synonymous with "Microsoft Word," and my problem with Word (as I believe most people's is) is not that it does too much (after all, some of the things that it does are mighty useful for collaborative writing, especially comments and revision tracking, and others are just nice to have, like the ability to add a horizontal rule easily without pasting in one from an external program) but that what it does, it does not do well. It gets in your way a lot. And sometimes it just doesn't do what it is supposed to. And it hasn't been a truly Mac-like program since modal dialogues reared their ugly head in Word 6.0.

So, I think we should revise what we expect from Nisus Writer Pro, especially since it is aimed at the full-featured market. It is not that it shouldn't do too much (after all, now we have NWE for that), but that the Pro version should implement future features (some of which are often requested and arguably sorely needed) in an intuitive, Mac-like, bug-lessened and elegant way. Much like in the OS 9 days, there is a sore need for a true Word replacement in Mac OS X (NWC was that then, which if I remember correctly had an outliner in a later version, and hopefully NWP in the future will be that again). Mariner Write is so outdated and was never full featured enough, and talk of MW4 does not promise enough. Appleworks is unfortunately no longer and has been replaced by a completely non-intuitive and finnicky Pages. And Mellel is a terror to use, uses a proprietary file format, and just doesn't work with the rest of the world that well, if you can figure out how to work with it in the first place. The best chance for that replacement we have (if only because its native file format is RTF, but for a many other reason as well) is luckily the word processor we have all grown to love, comments and other lack of features be damned.

Make mine Nisus, now and in the future. But bring on any feature that doesn't interfere (but helps) with my writing and aren't features for features-sake. I don't think some of these features are too much to ask.

Scott

Posted: 2007-07-08 02:18:50
by scottwhitlock
And I think Geoff should get the Workaround of the Year award...

Re: I dunno...

Posted: 2007-07-08 02:22:27
by greenmorpher
dshan wrote:
soulbarn wrote:
But my real question is why no outlining? This has been a requested feature for something like ten years!!!!

Is there a specific reason this never show up?
I hope it's because Nisus see both NWX and NWP as wordprocessors. If you need outlines use an outliner.

The only way to stop Nisus turning into exactly the sort of bloated, complex, bug-ridden, (and expensive!) mess that Word personifies is to limit its functionality to what a word processor represents. Avoid trying to jam in a grab bag of non-WP functions like outlining ...
The question is, of course, what word processing represents. :o I would contend very strongly indeed, that outlining is very much word processing. Many authors write their books on an outliner. I wrote business books using outlining. Every text book you have ever looked at is written in outliner style and if the authors didn’t use outlining, they were making life hard for themselves. Novelists write on outliners. It is simply a process of setting up your heads, then writing the text attached to each, preferably with the facility to re-order the heads (and the attached text). To be be pretty much a fully fledged outliner at the basic level, NWPro needs just one change -- a command to attach the body copy to the relevant head so you can move them around in your document [italics]in toto[/italics].

But I will agree with you about the layout, graphics and other stuff. That's not words. However, there is no question that many people want a bit of that too.
The dream of one tool to rule them all is a delusion that will inevitably lead to a worse product full of weak "features" that can't compete with specialized tools that perform the same jobs better and more reliably.
Actually, I would argue with that. Canvas is a wonderful argument against it -- DTP, vector graphics, raster images, presentations, animatiuon and web authoring all in one -- but sadly, the owners have just announced they are stopping development of the Mac version. It started as a Desk Accessory on Mac and now it's just for PCs. Sad. :cry:

And AppleWorks was pretty darned good. I simply can't understand why Apple killed it off. :roll:

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

Re: I dunno...

Posted: 2007-07-12 22:37:48
by dshan
greenmorpher wrote:
The question is, of course, what word processing represents. :o I would contend very strongly indeed, that outlining is very much word processing. Many authors write their books on an outliner. I wrote business books using outlining. Every text book you have ever looked at is written in outliner style and if the authors didn’t use outlining, they were making life hard for themselves. Novelists write on outliners.
You may write your books using an outliner but don't assume everyone else does. Particularly novelists, most of them wouldn't know an outliner if it bit them on the big toe. Outliners are a useful tool but I don't think they are nearly as universally used as you wish to believe. As long as you can pass documents to/from them and your WP you don't need an outliner in your WP. Sure you could add basic outliner features to NWP, but it'd never be as good as specialist outliners like Opal, Omni Outliner, etc.
greenmorpher wrote:
The dream of one tool to rule them all is a delusion that will inevitably lead to a worse product full of weak "features" that can't compete with specialized tools that perform the same jobs better and more reliably.
Actually, I would argue with that. Canvas is a wonderful argument against it -- DTP, vector graphics, raster images, presentations, animatiuon and web authoring all in one -- but sadly, the owners have just announced they are stopping development of the Mac version. It started as a Desk Accessory on Mac and now it's just for PCs. Sad. :cry:

And AppleWorks was pretty darned good. I simply can't understand why Apple killed it off. :roll:
No, the Canvas situation illustrates exactly what I mean--it's grown so big and complex, so hard and expensive to modify and maintain, let alone extend, that the developer has decided it's not feasible to keep it going on two platforms. Windows wins 'cause that's got more users, but the underlying cause is that big integrated software apps can only be afforded by Microsoft, Adobe, etc. And they pay a fortune in engineering, testing and support costs to have them. Smaller players have to pick their niche and stick to it or go broke trying to maintain an overly complex code base.

Ditto for AppleWorks, they killed it off because although it was good for simple things trying to add more powerful features to an old (originally pre-Carbon), integrated application like AW would have been way too expensive, time consuming and hard to maintain. iWork is a series of separate but tightly integrated apps that each concentrate on their own area and are written in Cocoa. And then there was Nisus Writer Classic, which had the same problem and much the same solution--start again from scratch and this time keep it simple and focussed, try to avoid putting the kitchen sink in. Work well with other specialist apps that provide functionality it doesn't have and that only some users require.

Nearly forty years ago now the originators of Unix realised that a good way to make reliable software was to build a series of small and relatively simple specialist programs that could easily pass information to each other for further processing, and have a simple method of chaining them together to perform more complex tasks. The PC world has never really implemented this idea properly and has suffered for it. LinkBack is another attempt to bring this functionality to the modern GUI environment, I hope it succeeds.

Re: I dunno...

Posted: 2007-07-13 02:01:05
by greenmorpher
dshan wrote:
greenmorpher wrote:
The question is, of course, what word processing represents. :o I would contend very strongly indeed, that outlining is very much word processing. Many authors write their books on an outliner
You may write your books using an outliner but don't assume everyone else does. Particularly novelists...
I don't assume everyone else writes books in outliners, dshan, but I happen to know quite a few people who do. The fact that not everyone does so does not mean that outlining capabilities are not elements of word processing -- or text processing -- and not well worth having as an integral part of NWPro. I have also written many marketing plans, proposals and CVs for clients using an outliner (MORE 3.1 mainly) and in non-commercial life, formal papers, reports and proposals on environmental issues.

As I have indicated in other posts, even at this point of development, Nisus Write Pro is nearly there as an outliner -- certainly it can do a lot of what I want of an outliner. A couple of relatively minor additions to the tools/actions would take it as far as it needs to go.

As for novelists not working with outlines -- well, I would suggest you try reading the accounts of many who write/wrote before they had computers and outliners available. Take the prolific P G Wodehouse, for example. First he wrote an outline ... (See "The Performing Flea").

There is also a strong niche market in specialist outliners constructed very specifically for novelists and other authors of chapter books.

As for your elegy to Unix -- your analysis of the situation of both Canvas and AppleWorks is quite wrong from where I sit and what I know from people actually involved and from reading relevant reports. Neither was in trouble because of alleged complexity of programming -- both, in fact, are very lean programs and relatively easy to work with. Both were sunk by business decisions -- bad in both cases.

As it happens, the world's biggest developer of graphics programs, Adobe, is moving in directly the opposite direction to your vision of a future in which lots of small apps are programmed in Cocoa and linked by Linkback or a similar process.

Adobe is following Canvas' lead into integration of multiple modes into one workspace. And they aren't about to be programmed in Cocoa either -- they have forced Apple to muscle up Carbon -- it is now far better developed than ideologues at Apple meant it to be, is on an equal footing with Cocoa, and in fact, is now at a level where AppleWorks could be rejuventated (but it won't be, of course).

All that said, I am as happy as Larry that NWPro is out, running as stable as a train and providing me with the tools to have a near complete outliner within it.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

Posted: 2007-07-13 02:22:20
by Peder
Geoff, Scott and dshan, you all make many thoughtful points regarding what a word processor should and should not be. We all work according to our special circumstances, and mine make me, if anything, rather side with dshan.

Not only would most novelists not recognise an outliner if it bit them on the big tow, most translators, authors of any kind wouldn't, in my experience, recognise the idea of paragraph formatting if it stood in front of them, hollered and poked them in the eye.

Many of them still use word processors as glorified typewriters, adding a space here and a space there, because on a typewriter a space means sod-all, and they add rows and rows of carriage returns, because on a typewriter it merely advances the paper.

Consequently, when I get the files of others to typeset, I'm resigned to the task of first stripping everything unnecessary (and potentially disruptive) out of them before reformating the whole thing to work for me. (I've tried to "train" a few translators, but most of them just dig their heels in.)

Given that, I'm a little disappointed that the NWP RTF still doesn't play nice with InDesign, in that italics and bolds, for instance, don't carry over they way they would with RTF from for example old Word 5.1. Alright, there are workarounds, which I've described elsewhere, and maybe CS3, when I finally upgrade, will contribute a bit to better cohabitation, but it would be nice if something could be done to make the whole process more streamlined and transparent.

Summing up, for me at least, a word processor produces the text, not the finished typographical product. For that we have layout programmes. Just imagine the feeling, when you've been working for an extended period in a layout programme, and then you forget you're in a word processor and suddenly try and grab a bit of text in order to move it or resize it … :oops:

Anyway, I would also like to say that I enjoy this forum a lot; it must have some of the wittiest, most thoughtprovoking, helpful and, above all, dedicated posters around.

Cheers,

Peder

PS I also think that NWP os a bargain; I bought the family pack for the three computers in the house, so now I have a spare NWE to go around :wink:

Posted: 2007-07-13 04:44:36
by greenmorpher
Peder wrote:Many (writers) still use word processors as glorified typewriters ... Consequently, when I get the files of others to typeset, I'm resigned to the task of first stripping everything unnecessary (and potentially disruptive) out of them before reformating the whole thing to work for me. (I've tried to "train" a few translators, but most of them just dig their heels in.)
Been there, done that too, Peder, with the same level of success -- i.e. none! But don't confuse outlining with paragraph styles -- Styles come into it really only because Paragraph Styles is the way to implement outlining in NWPro and NWEx. In fact the concept of outlining is simple -- you just set up heads or short descriptions or whatever, shuffle them into order, then expand them by adding further text. You don't need formal outlining tools at all -- it is just more convenient with the tools.
Given that, I'm a little disappointed that the NWP RTF still doesn't play nice with InDesign, in that italics and bolds, for instance, don't carry over they way they would with RTF from for example old Word 5.1.
I fear you are doomed to disappointment, Peder. I have a feeling that I have read on the PageMakr forum (a proportion of contributors are still using PageMaker, others are using InDesign -- a very knowledgeable group) at http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker/, that CS3 does not look at type formatting using command-i, command-b and so on. You will need to investigate that -- I may be quite wrong.

I just tried placing .rtf in InDesign from four more or less modern programs, NWEx, AW6, NeoOffice, Papyrus and TextEdit, plus .rtf from Word 5.1.

InDesign 2 correctly placed the Word 5.1 .rtf *AND* the TextEdit .rtf, retaining the correct type face and all the character styling added.

The others appeared with just about all attributes stripped out, including typeface. Effectively, it was plain text plus underlining.

So saving finally out of TextEdit, which opens NWPro/Ex .rtf files, might be the way to go, Peder. At least that way you keep working with NW's vbery nice interface! :D

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

Re: I dunno...

Posted: 2007-07-13 15:00:01
by dshan
greenmorpher wrote: As for novelists not working with outlines -- well, I would suggest you try reading the accounts of many who write/wrote before they had computers and outliners available. Take the prolific P G Wodehouse, for example. First he wrote an outline ... (See "The Performing Flea").
I didn't say novelists don't use outlines I clearly said outliner software. I can guarantee P G Wodehouse never used an outliner in his life!
greenmorpher wrote: As for your elegy to Unix -- your analysis of the situation of both Canvas and AppleWorks is quite wrong from where I sit and what I know from people actually involved and from reading relevant reports. Neither was in trouble because of alleged complexity of programming -- both, in fact, are very lean programs and relatively easy to work with. Both were sunk by business decisions -- bad in both cases.
Business decisions are not made in a vacuum. They were made because the cost of maintaining and extending the code was greater than the revenue they were getting from it currently and likely to get from it in the future. When costs exceed revenues products die. Apple haven't abandoned the market, they are building a new suite that will hopefully soon be a (full) replacement for AW. For WP and presentations it already is.
greenmorpher wrote: As it happens, the world's biggest developer of graphics programs, Adobe, is moving in directly the opposite direction to your vision of a future in which lots of small apps are programmed in Cocoa and linked by Linkback or a similar process.

Adobe is following Canvas' lead into integration of multiple modes into one workspace. And they aren't about to be programmed in Cocoa either -- they have forced Apple to muscle up Carbon -- it is now far better developed than ideologues at Apple meant it to be, is on an equal footing with Cocoa, and in fact, is now at a level where AppleWorks could be rejuventated (but it won't be, of course).
Sure they are, and they're suffering for it too (as are their customers in many cases). As I indicated previously they're big enough to absorb the pain for some time yet, but eventually they'll have to face the music just like Canvas and AppleWorks. Code bloat is like gravity and friction--you can minimise their effects in several ways but you can't eliminate them.

Of course the option we've not mentioned, for outliners and other areas too, is that Nisus are free to develop all sorts of handy add-on apps for NWP/NWX, such as their own outliner, graphics tools or even DTP app. That could be nice, you only need to buy what you need and they all work together seamlessly. We'll have to wait and see.