Desired NWP1.2 Features

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ninjagame
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by ninjagame »

Elbrecht,

meanwhile I tried it with an text written in Lucida grande which AFAIK is The OSX system font. Same result as with Futura. Maybe it's different with 10.5?

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Elbrecht
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by Elbrecht »

Looks like Leopard does the job -

it's up to Martin to open our eyes - but there's [SHY]ness in the air...

HE
Last edited by Elbrecht on 2008-07-12 14:55:49, edited 1 time in total.
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spower
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by spower »

Better file conversion and file reading from other apps would be good.

NWP does a passable job now, but it isn't great. One of the biggest problems for me is with tables. Even opening an RTF made in Word results in lost table dimensions in NWP. Opening of DOC files usually results in a lot of style anomalies. Pages typically does a better job with retaining styles. This is a big deal for anyone that works on collaborative documents (which is basiclaly everyone in the education world). It is a big pain to receive a Word RTF from a colleague and have to fix styles and table dimensions every time.
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scottwhitlock
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by scottwhitlock »

I'll add my old standbys to the list:

1. Either some way to wrap text around tables, or a captioning system for images. A way to autonumber those figures and produce a table of figures would be nice as well.

2. Split screen. I don't want to open another copy of the file. I want it to use two copies on the fly, like in Scrivener and in Word (but, surprisingly not in OpenOffice).

3. An option to have word count in the status bar, which would save a lot of room on my sidebar. Also, I would like a rethinking of the sidebar. It's a holdover from Aqua, and is a bit dated now. Is it time to move to a more Inspector-like system? Although I loved the side bar when I first used it, it is becoming more and more limiting, especially as I always need in view my extensive list of styles, but also the palettes for paragraph, character, statistics, and preferably language. Is it time to rethink having all of these in the sidebar and perhaps consider making use of other places, like the status bar or maybe...

4. A task-sensitive (and small) toolbar a la Pages, which simply restores the feature from OS 9 (whose word processing apps would have a toolbar that handled quick and dirty text, tab, style, and justification work and was often part of the ruler). I would also like to see these as optional so that people can use NWP the old way as well, because some people really like their sidebar.

5. I like the idea of multiple document managers, so that they perform project management functions. I could see having a document manager for my classes, one for my research, one for templates, etc. Each of these would be linked to a specific folder and could be assigned specific keystrokes, like cmd-dm1, cmd-dm2, etc. As it stands now, document manager as a singular beast becomes overwhelmed with files very quickly, and I find myself needlessly renaming them with starters like "Articles-" and "Teaching-" and "Research-" and "Templates-" and then the descriptive filename. If I could just simply have a DM for each, it would remove this necessity and make the DM an extremely useful feature, rather than the awkward child that it is right now. :roll:

5. A way to read tracked changes from Word would be nice as well, but not imperative for me. If I have to use these documents, I use Pages, which has better Word compatibility anyway.

6. Some sort of macros that could mimic a CWYW-equivalent from Word. Endnote now has an Applescript library, so I would like to see it with Endnote. But if it were with Bookends, I could deal with that as well.
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samuelas
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by samuelas »

Citation manager integration. I like scottwhitlock's suggestion for a CWYW interface. Now that Endnote works with Word 2008, without VBA (I haven't tried it though...) this should be relatively easy. I don't think Bookends would support CWYW, and in any case, the styles the developer provides--at least the styles I've used--don't work or are incomplete, and thus require a lot of extra tweaking.

Better still, however, would be Zotero integration. It's free, open source, and not a dead-end like the proprietary tools. They will soon have CWYW integration with Word 2008, and maybe the plug in they write for that could work with Nisus.
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xiamenese
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by xiamenese »

@scottwhitlock:
You can already do this ... the sidebar is customisable, and any palette can be dragged onto the desktop. I have Character, Paragraph, Lists and Image permanently on the desktop, and the sidebar open with Styles, Language and Statistics showing. The other things which I use less often like Margins, Sections, Tables and so on are all there in the side-bar tabs when I want to access them. And of course, the sidebar is retractable if you don't want it all the time.

That said, I do think there's one potential advantage to the ever more common Inspector. The inspector is app-wide, where the side-bar is document specific in the sense that you only have one inspector however many documents you have open, whereas each Nisus document has its side-bar. For that reason, if Nisus could program an inspector that is as flexible as the side-bar — note, Pages and Tables both retain the side-bar for Styles, presumably 'cos they are document specific, and everything else is on the inspector — then I might go for that, but I'm not sure.

Yes for floating text-boxes to contain tables or whatever, and captions.

@samuelas
Zotero is all very good it seems and not dead-end ... but you have to use and like Firefox which I loathe! So far, I have no problem with Bookends and it's not as if customisation or tweaking is that much of a problem in my book.
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scottwhitlock
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by scottwhitlock »

Mark,

I know you can do it that way, but nothing is more ugly than 5-7 palettes just hanging all over the place, especially since they stay visible when you go into Full Screen. I am just suggesting a more elegant rethinking of placement of all the tools. :)

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mythusmage
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by mythusmage »

Thought of a couple more. Well, more like thought of one and found the other.

The one I found is in Jer's Novel Writer, a shareware app found at http://jerssoftwarehut.com/index.shtmlJ ... ware%20Hut. It is an automatic outliner. that keeps track of changes is your project as you go along. New sections, subsections etc. are added to your outline as you go along. This is the sort of feature where when you learn of it you have to ask yourself, why didn't I think of that?

The one I actually thought of myself is a palettes window. Or think of it as a palettes dock. One click maximize, one click minimize. The NWP Palettes Dock would take the place of the Tooldrawer.

And now that I think of it, make NWP Help a proper Mac Help file. BTW, where is that PDF manual located anyway?
samuelas
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by samuelas »

@xiamenese

Bookends isn't bad. I tried Sente once or twice and it seemed to have a lot of weird quirks, where Bookends was a bit more predictable. However, apart from the incompleteness of styles (and the requirement that you, the user, complete them), Bookends' MLA style --one of the main style guides in the humanities (and by far the main one for literature) simply does not work, because it can't add titles for texts when you have more than one text by the same author. (Or at least it didn't last time I used it, which wasn't too long ago).

Compare this with Zotero. If a style doesn't work, you post to the forum and they fix it, usually pretty fast. I personally don't like tweaking about. A personal choice. I'm also not a big fan of investing much time up front anymore, since new tools always come along anyway--why waste too much time getting into a workflow when it will likely change completely.

In any case, I urge the Nisus people to explore a Zotero CWYW interface as well as an Endnote one, since we all like different tools--and perhaps writing macros for both would be more or less a similar task.

However, there's not much to be done with Bookends, since it doesn't support CWYW even with Mellel--it just has a nicer version of the scan that you have to do with Nisus anyway.
Groucho
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by Groucho »

mythusmage wrote:The one I actually thought of myself is a palettes window. Or think of it as a palettes dock. One click maximize, one click minimize. The NWP Palettes Dock would take the place of the Tooldrawer.
Now, what's the matter with the drawer? There's many guys have got it in for the drawer as though it were the gutter of hell :x . If there is a thing I like about Cocoa it's the side drawer.
Note: you can minimize and maximize any palette, change the place where it belongs and even drag it around the screen. Have a go at it.
mythusmage wrote:And now that I think of it, make NWP Help a proper Mac Help file. BTW, where is that PDF manual located anyway?
To locate the help file right-click or Control-click on the NWP application icon, in the finder, then select Show Package Content from context menu. The help file is located inside Contents --> Resources. Its name is help.pdf. You can duplicate it and move the copy wherever you want.
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mrennie
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by mrennie »

mythusmage wrote:The one I found is in Jer's Novel Writer, a shareware app found at http://jerssoftwarehut.com/index.shtmlJ ... ware%20Hut. It is an automatic outliner. that keeps track of changes is your project as you go along. New sections, subsections etc. are added to your outline as you go along. This is the sort of feature where when you learn of it you have to ask yourself, why didn't I think of that?
Even though NWP has no proper outliner, a very similar feature is already available in the current version. If you bring up the Navigator pane, you can see your current document outline, and it changes dynamically as you add more headings and sub-headings.
And now that I think of it, make NWP Help a proper Mac Help file. BTW, where is that PDF manual located anyway?
It is located inside the NWP application package. To see its location, simply open the PDF file and hold down the Command (Apple)-key while clicking on the icon next to the file name in the title bar. Note: this trick works with almost every application on Mac OS X; it's a very quick and convenient method to determine the location of any file that is currently open.
mythusmage
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by mythusmage »

[quote="mrennie"

Even though NWP has no proper outliner, a very similar feature is already available in the current version. If you bring up the Navigator pane, you can see your current document outline, and it changes dynamically as you add more headings and sub-headings..[/quote]

I just like the way JNW implements it, it's more elegant. Instead of you bringing up a pane the outliner appears in a subsidiary window to the left of the main window ("Oh gasp, a tooldrawer!") and the outline items appear next to the relevant sections/sub-sections/etc. It's a list of items, so it doesn't look as cluttered as the Nisus tooldrawer does. It is, however, automatic and there is no way to turn it off. Since JNW is aimed at the novel writing market that is not a bug. But for NWP I'd recommend someway to toggle it. A button in the main window toolbar, or close by on the left side.

And about that ".has no proper outliner." It looks like an outliner, behaves like an outliner, formats like an outliner. I don't give a dang if it is under "lists", it's an outliner. (Some people. :x :P )
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greenmorpher
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by greenmorpher »

RE: OUTLINING

I asked above for a couple of additional capabilities to make outlining in NWP a more automatic function.

In the meantime, you can do a very useful outline in NWP. You can download my prepared outliner .dot file and a full set of instructions from: http://www.marketnow.com.au/NWP_Outlining.zip

This is done with Paragraph Styles for a set of heads with both the outliner list feature and ToC incorporated, plus "fitted" Paragraph Styles for body text to run under each head.

It works very well. Oh -- you will have to add some keyboard shortcuts in your Prefs.

The capabilities I have asked for are to make it possible to move heads and attached body text around the document and up and down the hierarchy together.

Cheers, Geoff

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greenmorpher
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by greenmorpher »

Or simply http://www.marketnow.com.au/Outlining outlined.rtf

Cheers, geoff
Groucho
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Re: Desired NWP1.2 Features

Post by Groucho »

I have been using Jers Novel Writer for about a year every day. Yes, its outline is superb (not to say of margin notes). But JNW has a different way with sections. First of all, they are chunks, that means that each chapter, subchapter or what-have-you gets managed as if it were a separated file. For example, if you are in chapter 4 and select all the text (Comand-A) only the text in chapter 4 will be selected. So JNW's outline is rather like a database of single files than a real outline, like in NWP.
Of course you can move sections around, and they are renumbered accordingly if you set the program to do so. But if you want to add the content of, say, chapter 3 to chapter 4, for example, you must select all of the text in chapter 3, drag or copy-paste it into chapter 4, and finally delete chapter 3; this is more or less what you would do if the sections were separated files.
Of course you can perform many other tasks globally – searching a word searches within the whole file, not a single chapter; the chapter appear consecutively and seamlessly, and you can export the text into .rtf like a single structured book. But JNW is different. And different are its goals.

Cheers, Henry.
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