nisus.com

Hi,

After over six months of trouble-free work with NWP, I've just had a nasty experience. I'd imported a Word document received over the Internet, opening it in Word, saving it as RTF and then reopening it under NWP.

After a few minutes' work the document froze - I could open and close NWP, but I couldn't type anything. I had a piece of text selected, and couldn't de-select it.

On trying to work on another document, the one I use every day and which was created under NWP, I suddenly found that the stylesheet commands wouldn't work. I could type, but not change the styles of paragraphs via the palette.

I signed out from my account on the Mac and logged back in again; the problem was still there.

I was just digging out my registration data with a view to reinstalling the software when I decided to try rebooting the computer completely. When I did that, the problem had gone.

This raises a few questions:
- Should I reinstall anyway, even though now things seem to be OK again?
- If the answer to that question is "yes", are there any particular precautions to be taken when reinstalling NWP? Reinstalling over a previous version isn't covered in the manual I have.

- Could the problem have been caused by the way I converted that Word doc? Is it better to open a .doc file directly in NWP, or to first export it to rtf using Word?

Unrelated point: It's worrying to see spam messages in your forum. I hope you can get rid of them.

Best wishes, David Sharp (Paris, France)

David Sharp wrote:- Should I reinstall anyway, even though now things seem to be OK again?

I wouldn't bother. It's unlikely that anything in the application itself has been corrupted. In some situations there might be reason to clear out your preferences, but if the problem is gone now, I wouldn't worry. If you like, send in a report using the menu Help > Send Feedback. It may be that the collected log files will still contain traces of the problem.

- If the answer to that question is "yes", are there any particular precautions to be taken when reinstalling NWP? Reinstalling over a previous version isn't covered in the manual I have.

If you do "reinstall" you would just quit NWP, delete the old application, and then move in a fresh copy. But really, this is unlikely to ever be necessary. If you ever really suspect that some kind of local state is affecting the behavior of NWP it's far more likely to be related to your application settings, which are stored separately. Specifically, that data is located in two places:

~/Library/Application Support/Nisus Writer/
~/Library/Preferences/com.nisus.NisusWriter.plist

If you wanted to try a fresh slate: quit NWP, move away those files, and then relaunch. It might be easier just to create a new/blank OSX user account and run NWP in there.

- Could the problem have been caused by the way I converted that Word doc? Is it better to open a .doc file directly in NWP, or to first export it to rtf using Word?

It's possible, but of course that would be a bug in NWP. That said, the reality is Word will always have an advantage when converting .doc files.

Unrelated point: It's worrying to see spam messages in your forum. I hope you can get rid of them.

The spam posted earlier today has been cleared out and the user banned. We monitor the forum nearly daily, but we have to sleep sometime! We don't get much spam here, but this is the internet, so there's bound to be some.