NWP and iOS: About Back&Forth-ing

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adryan
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Re: NWP and iOS: About Back&Forth-ing

Post by adryan »

G’day, Vanceone et al

Pages strips out all your named styles from a NWP RTF document. (Actually, this way of expressing it is not quite right: see my final paragraph.) If you view the file in Pages and then Save it, it acquires a .pages file extension. If you Export it to RTF and then view the result in NWP, the only named styles you see are Header and Footer paragraph styles.

The document always appears the same: original in NWP, document viewed in Pages, exported RTF file viewed in NWP once more.

So I think the RTF coding is doing what it’s supposed to.

It’s not so much the styles that are stripped out: rather, it’s their names that you see in a style sheet.

Cheers,
Adrian
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xiamenese
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Re: NWP and iOS: About Back&Forth-ing

Post by xiamenese »

Hi @pbasswil,

I've sent you a private message on the Scrivener forum thread. I guess it will get through to you there sometime. In the meantime, the best I can come up with for you is to export your document from NWP as a .docx and open that in Pages. It does preserve all the heading and paragraph styles—though I did find one oddity in the file I tried.

You could try doing that to see if Pages on both Mac and iPad will answer your needs. But to my mind, nothing comes up to NWP in terms of usability … though no iPad version so far. :)

Mark
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xiamenese
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Re: NWP and iOS: About Back&Forth-ing

Post by xiamenese »

Further comment:

NWP and Pages-via-.docx calculate line spacing on headings—and maybe paragraphs, but it's not so obvious there—differently. So when you first open a .docx in Pages, you have to enter each one of your different headings and adjust the spacing, so that in Pages, Spacing = Font Size + Space Before + Space After, and then update the style definition.

HTH. :)

Mark
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martin
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Re: NWP and iOS: About Back&Forth-ing

Post by martin »

Vanceone wrote:As I understand RTF, it's built to use different applications and each application shouldn't be stripping out tags it doesn't understand--like, say, Nisus styles. And stylesheets are a core feature of RTF (RTF is basically the native feature set of, say, Word 2004 which certainly understands styles).

So my question is this: is this RTF app stripping out all styles, or only styles not actually in use in the document?
Other users have answered the specifics of what one app or another does, but I want to follow-up on the technical end of this question.

You are correct in that stylesheets are absolutely part of RTF and widely supported (eg: by Microsoft Word, Nisus Writer, Scrivener, etc). But it's up to each individual app whether or not stylesheets will be imported/exported. It's also up to each app whether or not features it doesn't support will be preserved after resaving a document. Unfortunately even though Apple Pages supports stylesheets and can handle RTF, it does a poor job and simply discards the entire stylesheet whether the styles are in use or not.
MacSailor
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Re: NWP and iOS: About Back&Forth-ing

Post by MacSailor »

martin wrote:
Vanceone wrote:As I understand RTF, it's built to use different applications and each application shouldn't be stripping out tags it doesn't understand--like, say, Nisus styles. And stylesheets are a core feature of RTF (RTF is basically the native feature set of, say, Word 2004 which certainly understands styles).

So my question is this: is this RTF app stripping out all styles, or only styles not actually in use in the document?
Other users have answered the specifics of what one app or another does, but I want to follow-up on the technical end of this question.

You are correct in that stylesheets are absolutely part of RTF and widely supported (eg: by Microsoft Word, Nisus Writer, Scrivener, etc). But it's up to each individual app whether or not stylesheets will be imported/exported. It's also up to each app whether or not features it doesn't support will be preserved after resaving a document. Unfortunately even though Apple Pages supports stylesheets and can handle RTF, it does a poor job and simply discards the entire stylesheet whether the styles are in use or not.
Maybe it’s time to put together a Nisus iOS app that will handle the stylesheets etcetera? :)
Peter Edwardsson
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ptram
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Re: NWP and iOS: About Back&Forth-ing

Post by ptram »

Here is what I tried with success:

1) From NWP, export to DOCX, then send the document to the iPad (via mail or Dropbox, or the like).
2) On the iPad, open the document with Pages.
3) Do your edits.
4) From Pages, send the document via mail in Word (DOCX) format.
5) When receiving the mail message on the Mac, open it with NWP.

It seems to me that even very complex documents can preseve stylesheets, annotations, highlights. Only, the footnote numbering style seems to be changed.

Something that could make the exchange more immediate is a File > Share > Attach DOCX to a new message command. This way, with a single command you will mail to your iPad a document that Pages can read. When finished editing on the iPad, you will be able to do the opposite, and mail you a DOCX that NWP will be able to read.

Paolo
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