3.0 Feature Request List

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midwinter
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3.0 Feature Request List

Post by midwinter »

I took some time the other day to look through the complete NWE feedback on MacUpdate, and I was really amazed to see the turn that happened between v1 and v2. So here we are on the eve of v2.5 being released.

I'm finding that for my day to day needs (which include professional academic writing in the humanities) it's perfectly adequate. Yes, I long for some more advanced features—table cell padding and cell spacing, for instance—but in terms of what I do, which is writing academic essays, it's great.

So for 3.0, here's what I'd like to see:
  • Editable styles of footnote/endnote reference numbers
    A re-imagining of the document manager window, and of document management in general.
    A "sort A-Z" command that ignores "the"
    A normal style with spacing after a paragraph set to 0.
    Bookmarking of some kind. I think there's room here to get a leg up on the others.
    Comment/notation features of some kind. There's room here, too, to get a leg up.
    Customizable highlight colors.
    A clear way to convert footnotes to endnotes and vice versa. Perhaps under the Edit>Convert menu?
    A better "insert date/time" macro.
That's all I've got at the moment. I only hope that our feedback in this beta phase has been helpful.

Nisus folks, I hope you have a big bottle of champagne ready for the 2.5 release.
martinkerz
Posts: 28
Joined: 2005-08-25 07:44:39

Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by martinkerz »

midwinter wrote: Editable styles of footnote/endnote reference numbers
Yes, this would be great. In addition it would be nice to be able to adapt the spacing of the seperator line between the text and the footnotes.
midwinter wrote: A re-imagining of the document manager window, and of document management in general.
Perhaps including some kind of template management and the ability to handle templates more flexible?!
midwinter wrote: A better "insert date/time" macro.
A better Macro handling in general would be nice. The Macro menu with all the macro header stuff in it looks not intuitive and userfriendly. Some kind of macro editor (like in TeXShop) would be nice!

And what I'd like to see, too:
  • What about better graphics manipulation, i.e. adapting the text flow around images and inserting graphics not only as characters but as independent objects (Pages is great in this area). Perhaps the idea of styles could be extended to graphics, too, so that you can have graphic styles… That would be great!

    Automatic creation of tocs and indizes
nachtschicht
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Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by nachtschicht »

What about better graphics manipulation, i.e. adapting the text flow around images
Yes, that would be nice.

Another features for 3:
  • Bookmarking
    FullScreenMode
    Small Outliner for Notes etc.
    Templates
Detlef
martinkerz
Posts: 28
Joined: 2005-08-25 07:44:39

Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by martinkerz »

nachtschicht wrote:
What about better graphics manipulation, i.e. adapting the text flow around images
Yes, that would be nice.

Another features for 3:
  • Bookmarking
    FullScreenMode
Full screen mode would be a nice, but no necessary addition. If you plan to do that, look at Ulysses. They have a real wonderful fullscreen mode!
nachtschicht wrote: Small Outliner for Notes etc.
I don't like outlining functions in word processors, as there are so many special outliners there (e.g. OmniOutliner) which are unbeatable. An implementation in NWX can only lose against these. Most outlining functions in word processors shouldn't have been added in first place.
midwinter
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Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by midwinter »

martinkerz wrote:I don't like outlining functions in word processors, as there are so many special outliners there (e.g. OmniOutliner) which are unbeatable. An implementation in NWX can only lose against these. Most outlining functions in word processors shouldn't have been added in first place.
Agreed wholeheartedly. I'm a paying user of OO3, and nothing comes close to what it can do. And with linkback...well, it would be plain silly for Nisus to waste their limited resources on something like outlining features.
midwinter
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Post by midwinter »

Yes on the image manipulation, but it won't hurt my feelings if that takes a back seat to something else.

But I completely forgot:

PLEASE make the cursor draw only the font point size and not the entire line height. Drives. Me. Nuts.
JBL
Posts: 170
Joined: 2003-04-25 14:33:59

Post by JBL »

My list of "must haves":
1) Better graphics handling (minimally, text wrapping around graphics)
2) Improved macros (mininmally some way of incorporating the find/replace functionality into a macro)

Other possible nice additions:
1) bookmarking
2) hyperlinking
3) outlining

I would really like to see an outlining feature, where text appearing in certain styles (e.g., heading 1, heading 2, and heading 3), can be designated to automatically appear in an outline in the tool drawer. Clicking on a topic in the outline would automatically take you to that place in the main text window.
ninjagame
Posts: 152
Joined: 2004-11-27 09:38:42
Location: Hamburg, Germany

one more must have

Post by ninjagame »

What I really would like (especially since I'm writing in German) is a "soft hyphenation" feature. The "Allow Hyphenation" menu sometimes produces funny results.
A more powerful spacing control wouldn't hurt either.
But in general: NWX 2.5 is on the way to be and to stay my most favorite word processor! Keep the good work up!

ninjagame
Tacitus
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Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by Tacitus »

midwinter wrote:
martinkerz wrote:........ I'm a paying user of OO3, and nothing comes close to what it can do. And with linkback...well, it would be plain silly for Nisus to waste their limited resources on something like outlining features.
I might be inclined to agree, but if you put any references (to go in footnotes) in notes attached to the outline in OO3 (or whatever) when you move to NWE you have to insert them all manually in the proper place. Also the last time I looked, OO3 did not have a zoom function which makes it more or less useless on a high res monitor. Well it does for me :-)

Now if Nisus wrote a small app or macro to convert these refs (eg they could be in the outline as: ^fn text^ or use other delimiters ) to numbered footnotes in NWE it would go some way to solving the problem.

cheers,

Tacitus
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.
midwinter
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Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by midwinter »

Tacitus wrote:I might be inclined to agree, but if you put any references (to go in footnotes) in notes attached to the outline in OO3 (or whatever) when you move to NWE you have to insert them all manually in the proper place.
Yes yes yes. A macro—or at least some cross-app communication on this front—would be most excellent.
ceffe
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Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by ceffe »

midwinter wrote: Comment/notation features of some kind. There's room here, too, to get a leg up.
I'm very much in favour of a comment/notation feature and think that Jers Novel Writer has the nicest I've seen (it allows putting comments in the margin). (Download it from his blog, and browse to an entry a bit down.)

Ceffe
midwinter
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Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by midwinter »

ceffe wrote:
midwinter wrote: Comment/notation features of some kind. There's room here, too, to get a leg up.
I'm very much in favour of a comment/notation feature and think that Jers Novel Writer has the nicest I've seen (it allows putting comments in the margin). (Download it from his blog, and browse to an entry a bit down.)

Ceffe
Yes! Good find! I particularly like the "notes" feature, since it might save me from leaving big ALL CAPS NOTES to myself in the body text of whatever I'm working on. And the margin notes are very cool, too, although not a lot different from MS Word's comments. I'd really like to have something that looks like an actual sticky note...resizable and even allowed to cover up text or lap over the side of the page.

But, again, there really room for NWE to set itself apart from the competition.
ndcahill
Posts: 18
Joined: 2003-04-26 05:51:07

Re: 3.0 Feature Request List

Post by ndcahill »

Key features for me would be a set of user-defined numbers, and a mark/cross reference system as we had in Nisus Classic. This was one of the great features of Nisus Classic, far better than Word or other wp's I have used; the lack of these features is a real hinderence in Express.
Ryan
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Post by Ryan »

First off, thanks Nisus for such a great tool! 2.5 fc2 is really, really good. And, in my testing at least, quite stable. I heartily appreciate your work! 2.5 has many of the things I've hoped for, and keeps up the tradition of total coolness that 2.1 began.

In terms of feature requests for later versions, I suppose I would enjoy bookmarking/navigation controls, templates, more-detailed clipboards, full-screen mode, continued improvement with LinkBack (although I'm sure that's inevitable), and importing/exporting/managing styles.

Hey, I thought I'd join the folks who were throwing out suggestions. Everybody's doing it, right?
jeffisme
Posts: 23
Joined: 2004-05-08 08:25:21

Post by jeffisme »

two things I'd like to see:

1) it would be great to be able to open a document where I left off (Maybe nisus can do this already?)

2) it would be great to have some kind of better macro support. i'd love, for example, to be able to creat a macro, that would allow me to add ellipses with one key stroke.
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