Test justify issues going from Nisus Writer Pro to MS Word

[jason555]

I am trying to edit the same file between Nisus Writer Pro and MS Word (I've tried both Word 2003 and Word 2002). I originated the file in Nisus on my Macbook at home. There is nothing fancy about the formatting--just Courier font, left justified, 12pt the entire way through. I saved it as RTF in Nisus.

Later (at work) I tried to open in on my PC in Word 2003 (and later on a different PC in Word 2002 with the same results). For some reason the font is now "CourierNewPSMT" (no clue where that came from) and even though Word gives me every indication that my text is left justified, the entire document is justified (that is, spaces between words are added to give a square left and right margin, like a magazine).

Nothing I do seems to fix this except changing the font to something other than Courier (in Word). I switch from CourierNewPSMT to Arial, for example, and the phantom justify format goes away. But if I try to change the font back to Courier New (CourierNewPSMT is not an option) the phantom justify returns.

Any idea what is causing this? Is there some weird language setting getting turned on somewhere? Anyone see anything like this? I really need to edit these files on both my PC and my Mac, so this is a major issue for me.

Thanks for the help.

[martin]

The font name you are seeing "CourierNewPSMT" is simply the internal font name in the PostScript world. I'm not sure why Word doesn't convert it to the user friendly display name before showing it to you.

As for the justification issue- I don't have any ideas what the problem could be. I'll take a look and see if I can reproduce it later, but you'll have to give me a day or so, as I'm away from any PCs right now.

[jason555]

Martin, thanks so much for the response. It's a nice reminder why people are so loyal to this software! I mean, aside from the slick writing environment and cool live thesaurus feature and stuff.

Anyway, to shed some more light on my problem. I tried opening the same files at home tonight in Pages 08 (on my Macbook) and in Word 2000 (on my wife's desktop PC). In both those programs the files open flawlessly. I am not sure if Word 2002/2003 is interpreting something wrong (doesn't Microsoft sometimes do things like that on purpose to make it harder for smaller companies?) or if I have some strange style setting in NWP set by accident or what.

Also, it's not just Courier. All the fonts seem to act and look weird (and not resolve to the proper display name: I get ArialMT and Times-Roman, etc.) Courier is just the most noticeable as it's the only one that seems to lock into that phantom justify mode. The others just exhibit strange letter spacings and look ugly.

Thank you so much for your help. Please let me know if I can provide any other info.

[jason555]

I am guessing you didn't have much luck reproducing the problem on your end, but I have some good news.

I think I've proven this afternoon that this is not a Nisus issue. I created a new document in Wordpad (the windows "free-be"), set the font to Courier New (the same font that has been giving me the most problems when opening my Nisus RTF files), and saved is as an RTF. When I open that new file in Word, I get the same odd text justification problem.

It seems to me that something in the RTF file header (I am guessing the Font Name field) is locking up something within Word and holding it in this weird state. Everything is full justified, but the menu settings tell me its left justified. Anyone have any idea what could be going on? Do I have a corrupt font file or something?

Anyway, I am also guessing that this issue is somehow specific to me, as no one else here has posted a response to this thread. I figure a large number of Nisus users have need to open their files in Word once in a while. It happens consistently on both my work machines (running Word 2002 and 2003) but never on my home Windows machine (running Word 2000). Perhaps something in "core install" my IT department does on all the machines (the only common denominator I can think of) is damaging something in the Windows font settings--is there even such a thing as Windows font settings? Ugh…isn't this why I invested in a MacBook in the first place?

In any event, I've come up with a work around, in case anyone is curious.

1. I open my Nisus files in Wordpad (they look and behave fine in Wordpad, oddly).

2. Select all the text and copy it (CTRL+A, CTRL+C).

3. Open a brand new Word file.

4. Paste the text in (CTRL+P, no fancy paste special or anything).

5. Then I just save the Word file as RTF and continue writing.

Kind of a pain, but I think I can live with it--and, again, I am pretty much convinced at this point it's not a Nisus bug.

Thanks for your help anyway. I hope I didn't cause you too much aggravation with this one!

[martin]

Thanks for the update Jason- our limited testing indeed wasn't able to reproduce the problems you described.

I really don't have any idea what could cause Word to act so strangely. It sounds like some kind of bug on their end, especially if Wordpad triggers the same issue. I also don't have any ideas on how to fix it.

Sorry to not be of any more help. I'm glad you've found a workaround at least.