More frustration with NWE / Hebrew

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ms45143
Posts: 7
Joined: 2007-01-31 08:48:27

More frustration with NWE / Hebrew

Post by ms45143 »

Thanks to Mark and Rivka for their advice about Hebrew. I guess the Hebrew without spaces was just a glitch, because since then it hasn't happened. I also checked the International preferences and made a few changes.

I'm still trying out Nisus and experiencing high frustration levels. I left Nisus Classic because I had no choice but to upgrade, but in my opinion, NWE has regressed from the original beautiful Nisus.

These are the problems I want to ask/share with you, and since I've been with Nisus for 12 years, maybe that gives me some seniority and an opinion worth listening to:
1) The worst is that I set a file to English and left to right orientation, but whenever I paste a piece into a file, it right away switches the selection to right to left. Imagine having to change the R to L orientation 25 times in a file, each time I paste a piece in. It's enough to want to dump the program. I've checked the Language settings, nothing seems to help.
2) The program is SLOW. Nisus Classic zoomed along on my G3, not taking even a second for each operation, but NWE takes several seconds to do each action. Scrolling is slow and jerky instead of seamless like before. Please don't tell me to buy a new faster computer.
3) Likewise for saving every file in RTF. This takes another 10 seconds to close and open each file. I work very fast, and am losing between half and hour and 1 hour a day due to Nisus's slow-moving and all these lengthy operations. (I have over 500 MB memory, so it is not the memory.)
4) The shortcuts don't always work -- can't figure out why.
5) Any time one touches the margins by accident, they get moved. Pain in the neck.
6) The new thesaurus is full of clicks and sends you in circles. The other one was much better. You saw the words in front of you and got to choose what you liked.
7) Any time you have to force quit, you get an announcement of a recovered file. Sometimes the recovered file has less than the original file so you have to check out both to see which has the most. Not much of an advantage, and adds to confusion.
8) How could the developers have gotten rid of all the graphics? A word processor without any graphics?! To get any kind of graphic effect, it's now necessary to insert a table and wrangle with it instead of making nice, elegant lines, boxes and circles in seconds.
9) I'm almost in tears at losing the great catalogue function, where it was so easy to locate, erase and move files. Instead I have to waste more time on finding and erasing files.
10) I can't finish without a few good words -- congratulations on the excellent Zoom and Table functions, and good character and paragraph attributes.

Please explain me what I am doing wrong to cause 1-5, and if Nisus is planning to put in some basic graphics. I'd rather not give up on Nisus after all these years, but there is a limit to how much frustration one can live with..
dshan
Posts: 334
Joined: 2003-11-21 19:25:28
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: More frustration with NWE / Hebrew

Post by dshan »

1) The worst is that I set a file to English and left to right orientation, but whenever I paste a piece into a file, it right away switches the selection to right to left. Imagine having to change the R to L orientation 25 times in a file, each time I paste a piece in. It's enough to want to dump the program. I've checked the Language settings, nothing seems to help.

Are you pasting text from a document/paragraph that was set to non-English, R to L orientation? Try Edit>Copy>Copy Text Only when copying or Edit>Paste>Paste Text Only when pasting, otherwise the text you copy/paste will retain the attributes of the paragraph it is copied from. Text direction is a paragraph attribute in NWX.

2) The program is SLOW. Nisus Classic zoomed along on my G3, not taking even a second for each operation, but NWE takes several seconds to do each action. Scrolling is slow and jerky instead of seamless like before. Please don't tell me to buy a new faster computer.

I don't have this problem, but I'm using a G4 and a Core 2 Duo. However, I used an 800MHz G3 iBook not that long ago and didn't have the problem on that either. How much RAM and what version of OS X do you have? Are the documents you're working on large (hundreds of pages or scores of thousands of words)? Do you get slow jerky scrolling and so forth on small documents too?

3) Likewise for saving every file in RTF. This takes another 10 seconds to close and open each file. I work very fast, and am losing between half and hour and 1 hour a day due to Nisus's slow-moving and all these lengthy operations. (I have over 500 MB memory, so it is not the memory.)

The RTF format shouldn't affect saving particularly, I've never noticed any such slowness (ten secs is certainly much longer than it should take). Size of the documents concerned? How much more than 500MB RAM do you have exactly (512MB is really quite minimal with OS X 10.4, it may well be lack of memory due to the size of the documents you are using and other apps running at the same time too perhaps).

4) The shortcuts don't always work -- can't figure out why.

I assume you mean keyboard shortcuts like cmd-a and opt-cmd-t? Is it always the same shortcuts that fail? Any error messages or they just don't do anything? Do you have some KB shortcuts set in the KB & Mouse system preference pane that conflict with NWX defaults perhaps?

5) Any time one touches the margins by accident, they get moved. Pain in the neck.

You're using page view? The margins on the page or in the ruler? Both? Mine only move if I click and drag them, you're saying you only need to touch them with the pointer and not click?

7) Any time you have to force quit, you get an announcement of a recovered file. Sometimes the recovered file has less than the original file so you have to check out both to see which has the most. Not much of an advantage, and adds to confusion.

You must have autosave set "to temporary backup files" in Preferences by the sound of things. These b/u files are only used when you either kill NWX (or it crashes) and then you restart it. The idea is to have another copy of the file (as at the last autosave point) in case the main one gets corrupted by a crash. If you've done a manual save of the document since the last autosave and prior to the crash then the b/u copy won't contain the last set of manually saved updates as they went to the main file not the b/u. If you set autosave to overwrite existing files instead (or switch autosave off) this won't happen (but you risk the possibility of the file being corrupted by the crash of course). It sounds like you are killing NWX quite frequently, why? Crashes/killing should occur only rarely, if they happen frequently you need to find out why.
Last edited by dshan on 2007-02-04 12:45:57, edited 1 time in total.
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Patrick J
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Post by Patrick J »

Hi ms45143

I too am a former Nisus Writer Classic user but my expectations of Nisus Writer Express were not that it would be a replacement for Nisus Writer Classic. I know that Nisus pretty will started from afresh, or in fact from another light word-processor for OS X (I think Okito Composer).

Slowly Nisus have been constructing from scratch a new word-processor which I hope will eventually have all that Nisus Writer Classic had and maybe more.

With respect to 2) I must say that for me Nisus Writer Express is very fast on my Intel iMac with OS 10.4.8. One thing you might like to try is unchecking "Font menu shows previews" in the "Appearance" pane of the preferences. This will speed up launch at least.

Like you I'd love to see the return of the Catalogue and I'd also very much like graphics creation. If Nisus implemented this as it was on Nisus Writer Classic then it would be a considerable advantage of Word and Pages as imho Nisus Writer Classic had more usability with respect to graphics creation than either of those programs. This is because Nisus Writer Classic functioned such that you would switch functionally to a separate graphics layer which was lovely imho. In Word and Pages you can't do this.

You might be interested in Nisus Writer Pro which is coming out in a few months I think. However this does not have any graphics creation but I get the impression it may have a graphics layer, so at least pasted in graphics can be put on the graphics layer perhaps? I don't know this for certain however.
Patrick
ms45143
Posts: 7
Joined: 2007-01-31 08:48:27

Re: More frustration with NWE / Hebrew

Post by ms45143 »

dshan wrote:1) The worst is that I set a file to English and left to right orientation, but whenever I paste a piece into a file, it right away switches the selection to right to left. Imagine having to change the R to L orientation 25 times in a file, each time I paste a piece in. It's enough to want to dump the program. I've checked the Language settings, nothing seems to help.

Are you pasting text from a document/paragraph that was set to non-English, R to L orientation? Try Edit>Copy>Copy Text Only when copying or Edit>Paste>Paste Text Only when pasting, otherwise the text you copy/paste will retain the attributes of the paragraph it is copied from. Text direction is a paragraph attribute in NWX.

No, I'm pasting from the same file. The selection I cut from the text was Right to Left, and when I paste it in elsewhere in the text, it switches to Left to Right.
Pasting Copy Text Only would make me lose all the attributes of the text which is a considerable loss.
All I want is that what I copy or cut from the text should appear exactly the same way when I paste it back in the file. Is that asking too much?

2) The program is SLOW. Nisus Classic zoomed along on my G3, not taking even a second for each operation, but NWE takes several seconds to do each action. Scrolling is slow and jerky instead of seamless like before. Please don't tell me to buy a new faster computer.

I don't have this problem, but I'm using a G4 and a Core 2 Duo. However, I used an 800MHz G3 iBook not that long ago and didn't have the problem on that either. How much RAM and what version of OS X do you have? Are the documents you're working on large (hundreds of pages or scores of thousands of words)? Do you get slow jerky scrolling and so forth on small documents too?

A file of about 113 pages, about 22,000 words. I checked again. I'm using System 10.4.8, have 400 MgH, and 896 MB. is it the 400 MHz that is making it so slow? I do not want to buy a new computer, especially since I'm not even sure I will stick with the system. I hung on to Macs because I loved Nisus, but if it has so radically changed, what is the point?

4) The shortcuts don't always work -- can't figure out why.

I assume you mean keyboard shortcuts like cmd-a and opt-cmd-t? Is it always the same shortcuts that fail? Any error messages or they just don't do anything? Do you have some KB shortcuts set in the KB & Mouse system preference pane that conflict with NWX defaults perhaps?

I changed some Nisus default shortcuts. Most of these work. I'll continue to check which ones don't.

5) Any time one touches the margins by accident, they get moved. Pain in the neck.

You're using page view? The margins on the page or in the ruler? Both? Mine only move if I click and drag them, you're saying you only need to touch them with the pointer and not click?

Page view. Usually I am inserting the cursor in the beginning of a row of text to select it, and then hit the margin line and move it unintentionally.

7) Any time you have to force quit, you get an announcement of a recovered file. Sometimes the recovered file has less than the original file so you have to check out both to see which has the most. Not much of an advantage, and adds to confusion.

You must have autosave set "to temporary backup files" in Preferences by the sound of things. These b/u files are only used when you either kill NWX (or it crashes) and then you restart it. The idea is to have another copy of the file (as at the last autosave point) in case the main one gets corrupted by a crash. If you've done a manual save of the document since the last autosave and prior to the crash then the b/u copy won't contain the last set of manually saved updates as they went to the main file not the b/u. If you set autosave to overwrite existing files instead (or switch autosave off) this won't happen (but you risk the possibility of the file being corrupted by the crash of course). It sounds like you are killing NWX quite frequently, why? Crashes/killing should occur only rarely, if they happen frequently you need to find out why.
So far about 1-2 crashes a day. But it wasn't any better with Classic OS so I can't complain.

Thanks for the advice about changing the preferences.
ms45143
Posts: 7
Joined: 2007-01-31 08:48:27

Post by ms45143 »

Patrick J wrote:Hi ms45143

I too am a former Nisus Writer Classic user but my expectations of Nisus Writer Express were not that it would be a replacement for Nisus Writer Classic. I know that Nisus pretty will started from afresh, or in fact from another light word-processor for OS X (I think Okito Composer).

Slowly Nisus have been constructing from scratch a new word-processor which I hope will eventually have all that Nisus Writer Classic had and maybe more.

Any idea how long this will take? In the meantime I have to get my work done.


Like you I'd love to see the return of the Catalogue and I'd also very much like graphics creation. If Nisus implemented this as it was on Nisus Writer Classic then it would be a considerable advantage of Word and Pages as imho Nisus Writer Classic had more usability with respect to graphics creation than either of those programs. This is because Nisus Writer Classic functioned such that you would switch functionally to a separate graphics layer which was lovely imho. In Word and Pages you can't do this.

I also thought that the graphic lawyer was spiffy and great. I used the graphics a lot. NWE doesn't even have graphics as basic as a line. That's a tremendous disadvantage. A client of mine just yesterday asked me to reply the broken line above her signature with a straight line. Guess what? I can't do such a simple thing on Nisus without creating a table and choosing to darken its bottom line. That's ridiculous!

You might be interested in Nisus Writer Pro which is coming out in a few months I think. However this does not have any graphics creation but I get the impression it may have a graphics layer, so at least pasted in graphics can be put on the graphics layer perhaps? I don't know this for certain however.
Not useful for me at all.

So far I haven't seen a thing on System 10 that outdoes System 9. The beautiful simple graphic interface that you chose as you wanted and stays that way is now replaced by an interface that they dictate and even if you set it up as you want, if you by accident close the window, you have to keep resizing it. To get where you want to get requires numerous clicks. But I guess because we have to make sure the developers make a living, we have to give up lovely systems and great programs for inferior products.
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