Nisus and website environment?

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-dp-
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Joined: 2009-09-21 18:16:57

Nisus and website environment?

Post by -dp- »

I wish to develop a site comprised of a number of related, hyperlinked articles. The articles will be academic, including multiple heading levels, block quotations, bullet lists, footnotes, diagrams, and tables. Although the main intent is to provide a collection of articles that link to one another, it will occasionally be necessary to share an article separately as a PDF, complete with all of the academic formatting. (And I'm finicky about this, which is why I don't write in Markdown. I lack the CSS skill to make everything render as precisely as I wish.) I need to develop the site privately and locally, entirely on my MacBook Pro, and then make it public only after I have completed a substantial number of articles. I need to find the best environment in which to develop. Nisus Writer Pro is a nearly perfect tool for writing the articles, but doesn't enable me to build the site. RapidWeaver enables me to build a nice site, but is not an ideal writing environment. Obsidian can combine the writing and the publishing, but uses Markdown, which doesn't offer sufficiently granular control when I need to output to PDF. It may be that I'm attempting two categorically different tasks, and need to accept that some copying, pasting, and reformatting will be inevitable. But I wanted to see if someone has found the magic solution.
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martin
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Re: Nisus and website environment?

Post by martin »

Nisus Writer Pro does have a feature to help export multiple related HTML webpages. We call the file format "HTML Chapters". You'll see it listed in the Export As dialog. It may satisfy your desired document deployment workflow.

The HTML Chapters format allows you to split your document into multiple webpages using a chosen criterion, e.g. create splits for a particular paragraph style. Any cross-references, bookmarks, TOC, and intra-document links in your text will be turned into appropriately connected HTML hyperlinks in the export. We use this feature to generate our online help guides, like the Nisus Writer Pro macro reference. You can see how the separate HTML pages link to one another.

This workflow allows you to keep your editable source material as a single Nisus Writer document, which you can export as a PDF or web page(s). For more details see the description of HTML Chapters in our user guide.

I hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any questions, or if this feature would need further enhancement to meet your needs.
-dp-
Posts: 11
Joined: 2009-09-21 18:16:57

Re: Nisus and website environment?

Post by -dp- »

Hmm. I will explore this. If I understand correctly, it would require that each article be a separate chapter in a single large Nisus file. That's doable in theory, but will probably become unwieldy as the project grows to include dozens of articles. Or maybe that's just a limitation in my thinking. If I think of them all as chapters in a book....

Thanks for your reply.
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martin
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Re: Nisus and website environment?

Post by martin »

That's correct: all your articles would need to be in a single Nisus document prior to export via HTML Chapters. However, you can bridge the gap using something like the menu Macro > Document > Join Files. That way you can have each article live in its own file until you're ready to publish and export them all to the web.
-dp-
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Re: Nisus and website environment?

Post by -dp- »

That would be ideal. I'll put together a few prototypes and try it out. Thank you very much for your help.
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martin
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Re: Nisus and website environment?

Post by martin »

Happy to help you! Please let us know if you run into any roadblocks.
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