NW for iPad?

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Candace
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by Candace »

That sounds heartening. I exported to Word binary as advised, but Dropbox couldn't open it at all. Now I've moved it into Pages manually (via USB cord), and tomorrow will see how that works.

I'm assuming that Nisus will be able to open the Pages doc once I finish on the iPad and send it back to the mothership. Or will I have to do something special?

Thanks....
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mrennie
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by mrennie »

Nisus Writer Pro will open these files effortlessly, although the document might look slightly differently if you decide to include images etc. For documents that contain text only, you should not notice any differences. And if there are any problems, the Nisus folks provide stellar customer support.
Candace
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by Candace »

Yes, Martin is a god among men. Thanks for your help.
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mrennie
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by mrennie »

Candace wrote:Yes, Martin is a god among men.
You know, that sounds like a great group to create on Facebook! :P
exegete77
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by exegete77 »

Or a great pickup line. 8)
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Candace
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by Candace »

Well, alas, it turns out that NWP does not open Pages docs seamlessly. Pages was able to open the Nisus doc exported as Word binary file -- with some formatting snafus -- but when I e-mailed it back to myself as a Pages doc and asked NWP to open it, I got a dialogue box that said it could only open it as plain text -- and when I said okay, I ended up with a page of symboled gibberish.

Maybe the thing to do is save the Pages doc as a Word doc (on the iPad), then ask NWP to open it.

Onward......
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mrennie
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by mrennie »

Nisus Writer Pro cannot open documents in the Pages file format. If you want to read the documents you created on your iPad, you'll have to e-mail the file as a Word document.
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xiamenese
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by xiamenese »

Nothing reads the Pages format apart from Pages ... it's a totally closed Apple format.
Candace
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by Candace »

Ahhh, I see. When mrennie said NWP would open the doc seamlessly, I didn't understand it needed to be in Word format. Thanks for walking me through this bit by bit. (Sheesh......)
ptram
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by ptram »

As of now, it seems that the only writing app on the iPad that can exchange fully formatted docs is Apple Pages. QuickOffice, DocumentsToGo and Office^2 cannot deal with paragraph styles and insert images, so they are unexplicably unworthy for actual office tasks. (I know, I know - I spend a lot of time to reformat unstyled documents from my colleagues, but this is not the ideal practice...)

The only reason I found, as of now, to use a "traditional" wordprocessor instead of a text editor, was to create diagrams with the iPad, and then load them into a report I was writing (the iPad is great for sketching and diagramming!). Alas, QuickOffice was not able to import image files. And then, the lack of paragraph styles would make it unusable for longer, structured documents (like a report).

Pages looks nice for this kind of jobs, since it can deal with images, tables, graphs and paragraph styles. At first, exchanging documents via mail looks a bit odd, since it is not as we always did. But it is a quick and practical way: if you have a connection with Dropbox, it means you can also mail a document (this more or less involves the same number of actions: touch the Share icon, choose the Mail icon, choose the Word format, choose your mail address, Send).

After having received the file on the Mac, you are free to open the attachment with Nisus right from Mail, move the file anywhere in the Finder, or delete the message and its attachment. All looks very clean, even if not as clean as syncing.

Paolo
ptram
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by ptram »

I must add that exchange via Dropbox has been introduced in recent times in Pages for iOS. The process is not all that bad.

To open a NWP document in Pages for iOS:

1) In NWP, export as Microsoft Word .doc (binary). Save the file to Dropbox.
2) On the iPad, open Dropbox.
3) Touch the document you just exported from NWP (its preview will appear).
4) Touch the Open icon, then choose Pages as the app to open it. The document will be opened in Pages.

To open a Pages for iOS document in NWP:

1) In Pages, open the document to be converted.
2) Touch the Share and Print icon, then the Open in… command, then the Microsoft Word format.
3) Choose Dropbox as the target app, then a folder where to export the document.
4) On the Mac, open the .doc document exported in Dropbox with NWP.
5) Save the imported document as a NWP document to a local folder.

It is not syncing, but it has the advantage of leaving the original files untouched. Deleting older versions is easy both in Pages for iOS and the Mac.

EDIT: Mailing a Word document from Pages for iOS could be even easier. I'm starting to prefer this option.

Paolo
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scottwhitlock
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by scottwhitlock »

When the iPad first came out and I bought one, I had no idea that it would ever become a work device. It was simply too limited. Things have changed. Now, on my 2nd iPad (iPad 3), I sorely miss Nisus Writer Pro (or even Express). I would love to be able to open a file I'm working on in Nisus (perhaps through Dropbox or even iCloud), preserve the formatting, edit it, save it back to Dropbox or iCloud, and open it up on the desktop version of Nisus with formatting and editing features unchanged. Even if this app had less features than Express, I think it would still be a worthy addition.

Here's hoping that something like that is in the works. And with the noticeable absence of a real word processor that works with Word and isn't as convoluted as the Pages app, there's probably a huge market for this. iA Writer just doesn't do it for me.

S.
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ptram
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by ptram »

Scott,

Why you call Pages for iOS convoluted? While I don't like the Mac version, the iPad version is elegant, clean, easy to use and reasonably powerful. I dislike the fake-leather finish, and the lack of TextExpander compatibility is a major issue for me when writing with an external keyboard. But overall is a great wordprocessor for a tablet.

I sometimes try iCloud, i.e., the online version of MS Office. Try that, to understand the difference between a well-designed tablet app, and something made by someone who shouldn't have understood the reason behind a tablet.

Paolo
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scottwhitlock
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by scottwhitlock »

I call it convoluted for the following reasons:

1. iCloud only - the only way to interact with the cloud directly is through Apple's own service, which if you must work with a lot of documents, is an even more convoluted mess, if only because I want a folder structure, not app-specific documents. It's the way I (and most everyone else) has been working for 20 years. Why force me to bend to iCloud, which if history serves, will be discontinued with iWork.com, iDisk, and every other cloud based system Apple has ever come up with? The only other way to share your documents (other than a hard connection through iTunes, which is the antithesis of intuitive) is to email them to someone. At least Dropbox integration would have been a nice addition (sure, you can open from Dropbox but don't try to save there - although almost every iOS product has this capability and there's no reason Apple can't include it in their own). And before you tell me this is not the Apple way, on the Mac OS X, this has mostly been the rule (reference Hotmail, which can only be accessed on the web or via Microsofts mail clients on Windows and .mac, MobileMe, and iCloud.com addresses which can work with almost any modern mail client, or iWork which allows for you to export into PDF, HTML, and Office and plays very very well with Office formats). This becomes more problematic because the iPad is a closed system, meaning you can't get at the folder system without jailbreaking it and it's almost impossible to save documents in a conventional way.

2. Pages for iOS documents are not consistent with Pages for Mac documents. This is its biggest flaw, I think. If you round-robin, as most of us do, because a tablet is not a laptop and never will be, I don't want to have to work with two different versions of a document - which Pages for iOS suggests strongly that you do. This becomes an editing nightmare. In which document did I make the last edit? You would think that Apple could somehow figure out how to at least preserve original formatting, even if Pages for iOS doesn't support that formatting (yet), in their own proprietary format! And although iCloud is (kinda sorta) an improvement over iWork.com and iDisk, it is still far from an intuitive or even powerful cloud storage solution.

3. The tools are never where they are supposed to be. But this is an iOS flaw and not a Pages-only flaw. There are over 500000 apps in the App Store, and each one has a different interface. Pages for Mac, which I do believe is a very well-thought out and dare I say it powerful program for the most part, at least follows Mac conventions (except when it doesn't want to - e.g. changing Save As to Duplicate, etc. - but these at least are changes at the OS level and, in general, can be worked around). Also, do I click the paint brush or do I click something else? And why am I pulled all the way out of the document just to edit a header or a footer into this weird skeuomorphic blue-print GUI? I'm supposed to layout complex documents on my iPad with Pages, yet it can't show me real-time WYSIWIG editing of the header and footer? Really?

4. Skeuomorphism gone wild. Need I say more? Maybe Jony Ivy will address this.

5. Although I admit that Pages for iOS has a lot of features, I don't think they are really "tablet-oriented," in that most people don't want to do full-scale document layout on a 10.1 inch screen. At most, I would like to write a long document, have headings, headers and footers, and then (and here's the key) have that document available on my main computer with all formatting in place - no changed fonts (even if the font wasn't on iOS). And in one file, not an iOS file and a Mac file. Maybe I'm limited in my thinking, but I can't believe that I'm alone here. I think iA Writer gets at this, but it's text only, so you can't bold, italicize, etc. I believe that RTF would be a perfect format for this, especially if a programmer could be sure to maintain high fidelity across iOS and Mac platforms. Especially if I could choose my cloud service (and it is no secret that most cloud-savvy Mac users gravitate to Dropbox because there may be cheaper solutions out there but none better and more elegant).

Now, admittedly, these may be built in limitations to iOS that cannot be overcome. But I don't think Pages for iOS is a 'best in show' product, no matter how pretty it is. Production programs live and die by workflow, and the Pages iOS workflow is seriously (and unnecessarily) limiting and ugly. And as long as it's the only full-Office solution for the iPad, I guess that's okay. But there are rumors (and they've got quite a bit of evidence to back them up) that Office is coming to the iPad, complete with Skydrive (which, I must admit, is flawed but beats the pants off of iCloud for document management and storage). I don't want to use Office (I'd rather use Nisus iOS), but I'm open-minded, because the ten-hour battery life, the portability, and the overall cool handiness of my iPad makes it an attractive device on which to do some serious writing. And if Office for the iPad workflow is only as good as the Skydrive/Word Web app workflow (and I bet it will be better), then Apple needs to seriously take into consideration the user's needs here.

But then again, that's just my $.02. Your mileage may vary - and if it works for you, more power to you.

S.
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MacUnix
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Re: NW for iPad?

Post by MacUnix »

I just discovered UX Write for the iPad. http://www.uxproductivity.com/
Has a lot of features and uses html as it native file format and can import/export quite well to .docx format.
Since NWP does a 'poor' job of importing .docx, losing tables and TOC, this format is a no go, since I'm not going to move to Word for Mac.

NWP opens and saves the html file, and no visible formatting is lost, but it destroys the internal format of the UX Write document, so you lose the paragraph styles and table of contents among others.
I attached an archive with the original UX Write document and the version NWP created when saving the file for comparison.
UX Write has .epub and ODF (.odt) support on the to do list, so this may be the route to go in the future, when NWP will supports epub import as well as export.
Better support for track changes is also announced.
It also supports DropBox versioning.

Maybe Nisus should team up with the creator of UX Write to improve the current .html import or create a new import / export filter.
I hope that NWP and UX Write will be the combination I can use for editing documents at my desk and on the go.
I use OwnCloud as my private cloud solution for syncing documents and since it has WebDav support and a sync client for the desktop, I can keep my documents
in sync between the two. Besides that, the web interface of own cloud supports versioning.
Attachments
UX-Write_vs_Nisus_version.zip
Original UX Write Document and version saved by NWP
(16 KiB) Downloaded 1221 times
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