Nisus Writer Pro Reviews

3.1

3.1

See all Versions

FYI Version 3.0.3 is out... This is a minor update to fix several important issues. This is a free update for existing users of Nisus Writer Pro 3. Requires macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or later.

I use it every day in conjunction with TextSoap https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/8974/textsoap to create PDF news summaries and PDF "work books" with wide margins for use with an iPad and Apple Pencil.

FYI Version 3.0.3 is out... This is a minor update to fix several important issues. This is a free update for existing users of Nisus Writer Pro 3. Requires macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or later.

I've used this for many years. The newest version has attractive features, but I'm not willing to upgrade until I see a dark mode version. Pages has it; so can this.

Powerful word processing program and I used it since more than 25 years

It's a nice word processor, and while your text will be rendered nicely on a retina screen (courtesy of Apple - not the developer) the user interface elements (toolbars, icons, the controls in the palette) are non-retina, so they look pixelated and chunky. C'mon, it's 2017, Retina macs have been out for 5 years now!

One of the best word processors.

The screen shot made me giggle because it appears to be from a PPC version.

In my opinion it is one of the best word processors. Like it. It is worth every penny it costs.

At this price, Nisus Writer is an absolute steal. One of the most powerful wordprocessors, without the usage complexities usually associated to this type of software.

Having been forced by the virtual global compliance of using MS Word for decades now, discovering Nisus Writer Pro was such a breath of fresh air that I feel a great weight has been lifted off my creativity. Word has become such a bloated pig over the years that it's practically useless if you care for efficiency at all. What shocks me most is that—despite being a writer in technology for years—I'd never even heard of Nisus! And now I just can't recommend it highly enough. So elegantly conceived, with spirited performance, clever tools, and outstanding documentation. Thanks to the folks at Nisus for a great product.

IT just consistently does the job, and has everything including the kitchen sink if you want to get much deeper into it. I trust it with huge, priceless files (text only), and it has never let me down. AND they seem like good, honest people who give a damn about their customers, unlike others . . . By the way, I am trying to give this a full 5 for Ease of Use, too, but it seems determined to keep me at 4.5 for some reason . . . Top five stars for all five ratings!

Sometimes I manage to get lost in all the possibilities, or my fading memory doesn't work right. Support at Nisus is always quick, patient, kind and forgiving. But be careful around them on April First... They can get erratic!

Sometimes I manage to get lost in all the possibilities, or my fading memory doesn't work right. Support at Nisus is always quick, patient, kind and forgiving. But be careful around them on April First... They can get erratic!

Sometimes I manage to get lost in all the possibilities, or my fading memory doesn't work right. Support at Nisus is always quick, patient, kind and forgiving. But be careful around them on April First- They can get erratic! :-)

Sometimes I manage to get lost in all the possibilities, or my fading memory doesn't work right. Support at Nisus is always quick, patient, kind and forgiving. But be careful around them on April First... They can get erratic! :-)

Sometimes I manage to get lost in all the possibilities, or my fading memory doesn't work right. Support at Nisus is always quick, patient, kind and forgiving. But be careful around them on April First... They can get erratic! :-)

I have been using this program since it was first released. I have used it to write and publish 2 books and I don't know how many articles, stories, short-shorts, brochures.......... For my genealogy work I have created documents in, or containing; English, Russian, Japanese (ideographic and Romanji both), and Hebrew. One of my favorite show-off tricks is to Drop the cursor in the middle of an English (or any other language) paragraph and start typing—in perfectly laid out Right-to-left Hebrew. If you can't read Hebrew and didn't know it is read "backwards" all you'd see would be an unreadable font in the middle of the sentence. That's how powerful and easy Nisus is. There's a lot to learn (they have an excellent on-line manual) but you can create nice documents the first time you open the program. You probably won't believe how powerful search/search and replace are. But you will love it. And Nisus too!

This word processor is incredibly customizable. From very simple to the most complex documents are easy to create. Multilingual features are very flexible and powerful. You can even customize new windows to open where you want them on the screen. It even supports quite powerful macros. The interface looks quite daunting, but it really doesn't get in the way when you start working... You just use what you need, then grow with it. I got frustrated with the new Pages losing so many features and after searching for something better, I can say that this does about everything you can think of doing. I just wish there were a Spanish thesaurus built in... though it's got about everything else you could ever think of having. You can even make your own sets of characters, like some hard to type Tibetan ones, available from a list you can just click on. I'd have to say it's the best word processor I've ever seen.

Nisus Writer Pro is for those who need the features of apps like Word or Mellel, but want an easier to use interface, better typography and great, responsive support. While I usually recommend Scrivener for outlining, researching and do large part of the writing of long (scientific) texts, Nisus is the TOP choice to make corrections, layout/formatting and finalise the work. It works nicely together with Scrivener, they both use RTF/RFTD, so that's about perfect. For all those unhappy with the latest release of Apple Pages, who need a more powerful "classical" word processor, I too recommend Nisus Writer (for Pages' layout functions, Swift Publisher is a good alternative). Highlights are: + BEST SEARCH- and selection-functions, EVER. No other app comes close. With help of "markers" you can search for virtually anything. If you ever had to clean up a 450 pages PhD thesis you get off your chair and applaud seeing this! :-) + CORRECT HYPHENATION for other languages than English! This is where both Mellel and Pages fail – what can get really embarrassing… Nisus does it perfectly (hyphenation is editable using TeX as far as I understood, but it is correct, so I never had to tinker with it). + good typography. Nisus uses OS X's own text engine, therefore no ugly "white spots" between the words in justified alignment like you get in Word or Mellel, letters go smoothly one into the other, they aren't block wise displayed (and printed) like in the other two apps. + easy to use interface, everything customisable (create your own toolbar items, with custom icons, drawer's menus customisable etc.) + really good support of all common file types, great compatibility with MS Word (Nisus uses the LibreOffice translator) + very complete foreign language features, right-to-left, for every language the correct smart quotes (resp. guillemets, this is customisable too of course), and yes I've mentioned it, but again: correct hyphenation! + Cross references, footnotes over multiple pages and what else you need for scientific texts (bibliography apps integration, etc.) + integrated Nisus Thesaurus, very practical, if not essential when doing corrections. + Both portrait and landscape orientation can be set individually for each page/section in a file. Very practical if you have a larger table or figure in your text + smooth scrolling (unlike Word) and good performance also with very long texts (except the opening of the file: that can take quite some time with a large file) + efficient user interface: Nisus comes with its own macro script language so you can automise lots of your work + multiple clipboards with history + practical navigation sidebar (titles, bookmarks, etc.) + merge fields easy to use + best-in-class (my opinion) track changes and comments, compatible with Word + Great support, regular updates Things that are not so great: – the app looks a bit old, especially the icons are in need for a revamp (however you can replace them with your own icons). Not really shiny the whole thing. – no footnotes in tables, you need to tinker there (write superscript numbers in the table, then at the end of the table insert a footnote and make its ref number invisible. It's OK but kind of sucks if you have a table over multiple pages). Nisus is working on that problem I heard… – the QuickLook plugin for RTF and RTFD is made by Apple and isn't so great.

Nisus Writer Pro is more than the old fashioned 'word processor'. Of course it does that superbly but the improvement and extensions, since the original version of 1988, increase its usefulness. Too much to describe here, but the notable items i use are: Find and Replace - literally anything. Tables. Import and Export of files from/to other Applications. Long Documents - this is where Nisus Writer excels. Try it - www.nisus.com.

Nisus Writer Pro is a match for Microsoft Word in features and far surpasses Word in speed and ease of use.

Downloaded via program's update, but it wouldn't launch so reverted to previous version 2.02. Maybe it's just me, or download corrupted, on Lion current version. Otherwise, like the program.

The best Word processor!

I have been using Nisus Writer since 1993! Back in the early Mac days. And it was awesome, especially because it worked with the most amazing Regular Expression engine and so forth. The app was pretty much the reward of academics, coders, and general erudite worshipers of language, especially foreign languages. Nisus had the best dictionaries and everything. And Nisus still is above and beyond other text editors and word processors. Amazing. Still.

I'm always amazed to see small developers continue to exist and make great products and stay in business in this shark infested waters of office productivity suites.

Just the best word processor for Mac OS X. Easy to use, rich, and : uses the RTF format. I think it matters.

I tried Nisus for 2 weeks and I think that Mellel is a better writer for my needs (academic...).

Nisus Writer Pro is a _very_ good word processor. As noted below, its comments and change tracking are compatible with Microsoft Word. Built-in drawing features, auto-numbering, table of contents, indexing, widow-orphan control, cross references etc. are powerful and easy to use. It uses the Open Office converter to import-export Word files so the compatibility with Word is quite high. (Import-export filter is selectable in Preferences between Open Office and Apple--Open Office is better.) It has the "classic" (Nisus products have been around for decades) Nisus features such as powerful (regex, I think) searching and a built-in macro language, neither of which you need to worry about if you don't want to. It uses style sheets (again, only if you want to) and has an innovative way of setting up and modifying them. This is a full-on Cocoa program which is saying a lot for the maker's commitment to the Mac as this took a full re-write of older code. Palettes live in a drawer and update depending on context--one of the most effective ways to provide features as needed. They contract/expand easily and scroll within the drawer, but little scrolling is needed since they are context-sensitive. Slick and pretty it is. Picking nits a little, it doesn't have page thumbnails (but it does have a document navigator) or a split or other multi-pane view. I suppose you could take care of this by making a copy of Nisus and opening both on the same file. Also, it does not intelligently place floating objects, such as at the top of pages or columns. However, in the last few days I have been evaluating all Mac options for a technical paper I plan to write and in this respect (smart float placement) Nisus is exactly on par with all the others, even Word. (I was stunned to learn this, especially about Word. I wrote with FullWrite Professional from 1988 to probably 1998 and it handled this job with aplomb. For technical writing with rigid layout requirements from the publisher, LaTeX via LyX looks like a very good option but with some set-up and learning involved.) Word compatibility is better than Pages while at the same time NWP provides more power and thus converts more aspects to-from Word (using OO converters). Using NWP is a pleasure and does not cause my blood pressure to increase like it invariably does with Word. Nice job.

New version 2.0 is out for this excellent app !

I recently rediscovered this application I purchased over a year ago, primarily for the purpose of taking notes in law school classes. For note taking purposes, MS Word is unnecessarily complicated and overbearing with it's many attempts to format my document for me, etc. Nisus is simply the nearly-perfect word processor I've been looking for. Along with a great Mac interface and many powerful features, the things I have recently found to be outstanding are the Document Manager, which I thought was strange an unnecessary at first, the Styles view for modifying styles, and the simplicity of its Table of Contents feature (right-click line, choose "Include in TOC", something Word still does not allow so easily). I really, truly hope Nisus continues updating this amazing piece of software, as it fills a great spot on the Mac. Pages is just not a capable-enough word processor (and it does not use a standard file format by default, while Nisus uses the very standard RTF), and MS Word serves its purpose (mainly compatibility with the world), but for my own uses, Nisus is simply the best.

Four people recommend Lotus Symphony? Four?

Nisus Writer Pro manages to pack an enormous number of powerful features into a clean, fast, and well organised interface that never feels obtrusive or unwieldy. And it's that last bit that makes so much difference in day to day use. While I appreciate the role filled by the Mac version of Microsoft Word, and it has really improved in substantial ways over the years, yet it has never managed to work the way I expect a Mac application to work. In part this is understandably due to a set of conventions that are specific to the MS Word world and that users expect to have carried forward over time. But it's more than that, too. Word has a tendency to let its power and complexity get in the way of what I'm trying to do. Or in the case of some of the users I support, Word lets them render their documents bewilderingly unusable. In my experience this is due in large part either to the intrusion of overly complex features into the users work, or to the overly complex implementation of those features. This is precisely what NWP has avoided! NWP behaves exactly as I expect a Mac application to behave. It stays out of my way while I'm using it, yet it keeps a wealth of powerful tools quickly at my disposal.