Gave NWE1 a trial. Am not previously a Nisus user; am a very experienced user of other tools.
Noted the following shortcomings, lacks, or oddities that ought to be addressed:
* "Nisus" in text is red-underlined - is it not in the dictionary?!?
* The icons beside the paragraph spacing sliders are very hard to interpret on first meeting. Managed to get space between paras but later discovered, I had done it by adding space-after.
* when a para has space-above (-below), the insertion point cursor and any selection hilite in the first (last) line extend above (below) by the amount of space-above (-below). Perhaps a feature, but it looks odd.
* The control for line-spacing operates only in units of lines, the text box will not accept entry of a point value. See page 100 of the manual, measurements are supposed to be in, cm, pt, or pc - no mention of lines. What is a "line" when you can have characters of different heights in a line?
* There is no way to paste text only from another doc. Paste green, 20-pt Verdana text from a web page at the end of a sentence, and you get green 20-pt Verdana text. And worse, if you put the cursor at the end of that paste and type, you are now stuck in green 20-pt Verdana -- the only way to get back to your default format on that line, is to copy some text from elsewhere on the page and then type over it.
* the help file is laughable - one sentence per menu??
* There are formatting errors in the manual: in the TOC, the 3rd chapter head is wrong font; and throughout cross-references to Figure N are too small.
* I can't make Insert>Image work, it adds space to the document but the image doesn't appear. Tried TIFF, PNG and JPG files. (added)
I'll deal with functional shortcomings in another post.
Oddities noted on first trial
Oddities noted on first trial
Last edited by thorby on 2003-10-06 13:57:07, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Oddities noted on first trial
Generally I agree with your comments; however I had the following notes.
Nisus uses the system dictionary. It would seem a little presumptuous of Nisus to add their name to your dictionary.thorby wrote: * "Nisus" in text is red-underlined - is it not in the dictionary?!?
Am I missing something here? Nisus seems to operate the same way as every other Mac program. I just tested this with Word, Eudora and TextEdit to make sure I wasn't nuts. If you paste something into the middle of a document and start typing from that point what you type takes on the style of the thing you pasted. Explain. If there is some shortcut I don't know of to get inserted text to take the style of the text after the insertion point that would be very helpful.thorby wrote: * There is no way to paste text only from another doc. Paste green, 20-pt Verdana text from a web page at the end of a sentence, and you get green 20-pt Verdana text. And worse, if you put the cursor at the end of that paste and type, you are now stuck in green 20-pt Verdana -- the only way to get back to your default format on that line, is to copy some text from elsewhere on the page and then type over it.
Yes, while older (classic) Mac apps typically paste only ascii, no formatting, current mac apps all paste the styled text... and they are all wrong!Am I missing something here? Nisus seems to operate the same way as every other Mac program.
Or at least, incomplete. There should be a paste option -- it could be a separate Edit menu item, the way "Paste as quotation" is a separate Edit item of email apps -- for Paste Text Only.
Here's why.
Say you are writing a document and you have, with your normal impeccable taste, decided it will be in 12-pt black Palatino. OK?
Now, you really want to cite the clever words of Joe Loudmouth's blog, so you go to blog.loudmouth.com and you copy Joe's words -- which happen to be pale lilac 14-pt Trebuchet -- and now you paste!
You know what you get -- a blob of unreadable lilac sans-serif in the middle of your report to the Board. What do you do now?
With NWE1 (or Appleworks), there is only one thing you can do: carefully select the pasted text and then manually and tediously, change the color, and change the font, and change the point size.
Three.
Separate.
Menu operations.
Some few WP apps (not NWE) support the ability to copy font-size-style and paste font-size-style. Using this, you could rectify the pasted blog text in only TWO menu operations.
Some WP apps (but not AppleWorks) allow you to force a paragraph back to its default styling in one operation. Even that is a waste of the writer's time. You just wanted to paste some words and the original styling is not relevant to the words -- in the context where you paste them.
Having been bitten by this many times using Appleworks, I ain't gonna buy any possible replacement that doesn't fix it.