🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5200@mnetor.UUCP>, frank@mnetor (Frank Kolnick) writes:
>When Nisus was released, I ordered their demo disk, as I was 
>frustrated with Word. I spent about a week trying to convert a chapter
>of a book I was writing to Nisus. This is a *lot* of work because
>Nisus doesn't understand Word files and doesn't have the

Hmm.  Nisus doesn't understand Word styles, but it should convert Word
documents without any trouble.  I've converted all of mine (some
needed some minor touchup, but there were no major headaches).  You
can't convert documents saved in "Fast Save" format, though.  Maybe
this was your problem?

>equivalent of style sheets (no, char. styles are *not* the same).

This is true, but it's easily worked around.  I suspect it would be
more of a problem if you were working in a group and wanted to have a
readily definable "Heading" style (or something like that).  But since
styles are local to Word documents (at least the DOS version of Word
stores them separately), I don't see what the big advantage is.

Nisus has a simple way to change text and/or attributes from one thing
to something else.  You can easily change all the "Nisus"'s in your
document from bold to italic.  Very straightforward.

But I agree, sometimes styles are better.

>Anyway, my conclusion was that, while I'd really like to have all
>of the nice *extra* features that Nisus provides, but I couldn't live
>without the *essential* features that Word provides (more flexible
>paragraph spacing, for example). And with Word 4, I find I actually
>like its interface, which I think is cleaner and less cluttered than
>Nisus (I'm not fond of little icons all over my screen).

I really have to disagree with you here, but I won't try to convince
you.  But the recent discussion in this group of how to get fonts to
show up in Word's font menu points out serious interface flaws that
Microsoft has never (and probably will never) address.  Nisus's
interface is *very* clear and easy to understand (although I will
grant that it relies on perhaps a few too many icons).  Yet once you
understand what those icons mean, it makes the program very simple and
intuitive to operate.  Sort of like the finder, I guess.

There are very few modal dialogs in Nisus, which is a big plus.  Cut
and paste work *everywhere* -- even the Edit menu works.  This is
great for novices, who haven't learned (from badly conceived software
like Word) that "you can't do that here."

>Now, as always, choose the wp that provides the functions you need
>with the interface with which you feel most comfortable. In my
>opinion, Nisus is a very good, medium-power wp, perhaps in the class
>of MacWrite. Try before you buy.

No, it's significantly more powerful than MacWrite, but not much more
difficult to use.  It lags behind Word in a couple of areas (no
automatic table creation -- a very nice feature of Word 4; mail-merge
is a bit kludgy (relies on macros); and true styles would be nice),
but is far superior in many others:

	o Unlimited undo and redo.

	  This is a big help since it lets you back out of many
	  changes.  I've used it many times to get my document back to
	  the state it was in 5 minutes earlier -- after I'd made
	  dozens of changes.  You can't do that with any other Mac
	  application (that I'm aware of).

	o 10 clipboards.

	  Implemented in such a way that even a novice can make use of
	  them.  And once you have more than a single clipboard, you
	  wonder how you ever got along without this feature.

	o Macros to let you do nearly anything you want.

	  One of my favorites is one they supply you with:  It goes
	  through your document and changes letter combinations like
	  "ff", "fi", etc. into the appropriate ligatures, then prints
	  the document, then changes them back (for ease of editing).

	  The macro itself is quite straightforward and could have been
	  designed by anyone with a little computer experience.  

	  First time users, though, might have difficulty creating the
	  more advance macros, although macros can be recorded, which
	  makes things easier.

	o Integrated drawing and text around/on top of/with graphics.

	o Saves files as TEXT documents (formatting in the resource fork).

	  I thought this was particularly neat, since it allows you to
	  open your Nisus documents with DAs like miniWRITER or
	  whatever.  The TEXT portion is quite readable, so this gives
	  you a quick way to browse through your files when you're
	  doing something else.  I've opened/copied/uploaded portions
	  of my Nisus files when I was online in Versaterm.

	o Sophisticated searching through open and closed documents.

	  This is incredibly useful, since not only do you have full
	  regular expression search and replace (including an "EZ"
	  mode that allows novices to search for things like returns,
	  tabs, etc. without resorting to Word's bizarre "^p" syntax),
	  but you can also search through hundreds of Nisus and TEXT
	  files very quickly, without going through the bother of
	  opening each one.

	o Excellent footnote and index/table of contents handling.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that I was very happy I made the
switch from Word to Nisus.  It's really on a par with Word in terms of
features, the interface is wonderful, and the support is great.  Even
the manual is great (once you've inserted the errata sheets they give
you -- something I could have lived without).

So give it a try if you're looking for something a little more
powerful than MacWrite or WriteNow, or if you're just sick of Word's
idiosyncrasies and bizarro interface.

--
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   baumgart@esquire.dpw.com     | 
   cmcl2!esquire!baumgart       |                           - David Letterman