DDCHENE I've been using Nisus Writer and now Nisus Express for fifteen years or more. For a long time I used Framemaker for design and long documents, Nisus mainly for text-munging and documents that didn't need much layout. Nisus was quirky (the graphics layer never quite worked) but it did some things so much better than the competition that I put up with the quirks. Discontinuous selection did and still does set Nisus apart. The new Nisus is not ready for serious work. It doesn't display properly, it hangs, it's clumsy in its handling of styles (why can't more than one style at a time be deleted, for example, which would be a boon in cleaning out unused styles in Word docs?). The Nisus macro language has disappeared. Perl is supposed to take its place. It doesn't. Try sorting paragraphs with styles and unicode. The result? No styles, all the unicode deleted. Useless. You can't compensate with Applescript very easily because the program is not recordable and there's no support to speak of beyond the standard text suite. Serious wordprocessing requires "keep on same page", widow & orphan suppression, date and time stamps -- to mention a few things conspicuously lacking that Nisus Classic did reasonably well. I'll use Nisus to work with Word documents and cross my fingers in hopes that it doesn't hang. Otherwise I'll use Tex-Edit for munging and put up with Indesign when I need layout. (Version 2.1) |