nisus.com

Dear List members,
I am coming to write as I was interested to have a copy of Nisus Writer Pro in my new MacMini, after many years working with Pro and now writing a book in LaTeX.
I would like to use Nisus Writer Pro for my next enterprise. I would like to know however, if it really can create a Camera Ready copy, without passing through PageMaker or Adobe Illustrator for instance. This is very important for me, as I mix hieroglyphs and normal text for instance.
As Egyptologist, I have also an issue about indexing. As the Egyptian hieroglyphs are transliterated, the transliteration follows an order which is not the usual one. In Nisus, is it possible to create an automatic index following customised rules?

Any reply counts. I never loved MS Word, I am accepting the LaTeX is not bad, but I quite fancy Nisus. I need however that I am able to have the final copy directly with it, without passing from other software.

Roberto Gozzoli

Hi Roberto,

pharaoh wrote:As the Egyptian hieroglyphs are transliterated, the transliteration follows an order which is not the usual one. In Nisus, is it possible to create an automatic index following customised rules?

I'm afraid not. At this time the ordering/sorting of the generated index is not user configurable, sorry about that. It's on our list of features to add, but I'm not sure when you'll see it added.

If you have any other specific questions about preparing your book, please let us know.

Dear Martin,
I thank you for the reply. I understand the point about indexing, but this raises me another question. Can I mark the words I want to put in the transliteration index, so they will be put in an index by their own and manually sort them?

I believe that there is no problem about hieroglyphs or any images in Nisus. I have decided to give Nisus a try, at least for small works at the beginnings.

Thank you,

Robert

Happy to help Robert...

pharaoh wrote:Can I mark the words I want to put in the transliteration index, so they will be put in an index by their own and manually sort them?

You can mark all the words in a special transliteration index (NWP supports multiple indexes), but sorting the generated index by hand presents some problems:

1. If you need to rebuild the index, your manual sorting will be lost. Put another way: rebuilding the index is complete and not incremental. Any changes you made by hand since you last inserted/rebuilt the index will be lost.

2. The page numbers in a generated index use special invisible formatting that tracks what content they are linked to (eg: so saving a PDF creates hyperlinks, so the numbers can be updated as your document content shifts pages, etc). Editing the generated index by hand can disrupt these.

Therefore I wouldn't recommend this approach unless you were absolutely done with your document/index and didn't mind that the page numbers won't update or be linked to their content.