Oddities noted on first trial
Posted: 2003-10-06 13:07:03
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.
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.