nisus.com

The new document import is SLOW. Even simple one page documents take an extraordinary amount of time to import. I've got one of the latest Macbook Pro laptops, so it cannot be a matter of speed of the machine or memory. Its got a 7200 RPM hard drive. It is just SLOW. The speed of import must be fixed.

...Mike

Even on the mighty 1.83 Ghz it ought to work a lot, lot faster than it does.

Cheers

Geoff

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09:06 AM, November 17, 2008

The .doc importer does take quite some time to load. It's an unfortunate characteristic of OpenOffice, which our importer is based off of, that we can't do much about. However, OpenOffice just released a new version, which we are looking to move to. Hopefully that can help in this regard.

One thing to note: it's only the first document you import that should take long to load. Subsequent documents will be converted much faster.

martin wrote:The .doc importer does take quite some time to load. It's an unfortunate characteristic of OpenOffice, which our importer is based off of, that we can't do much about. However, OpenOffice just released a new version, which we are looking to move to. Hopefully that can help in this regard.

One thing to note: it's only the first document you import that should take long to load. Subsequent documents will be converted much faster.

That's good news. Let's hope the new importer loads faster, but it's true that once it's loaded, subsequent conversions are much quicker.

Mark

I don't know if it affects the file conversion functionality or not but a significant issue with incorporating OpenOffice 3.0 into NWP would seem to be the lack of a Mac PPC version - currently OO 3.0 is Mac Intel only. OO 2.4, which is the version NWP 1.2 appears to use, is available for both Intel and PPC. Apparently code for OO 3.0 PPC does exist, but it's very buggy according to the folks at NeoOffice who are currently struggling to incorporate it into their new version. It's a real pity because OO 3.0 does .docx conversion too.

Some day, PPC support will have to go. There are still a lot of PPC Macs around, and they will go on serving people very well for a long time, but they will be a diminishing proportion of the market. Nisus will have to ask the hard question: is continuing to serve the PPC users fully an appropriate use of our resources in light of the return?

If OO can fix their problem with translators, I guess the question will be put on the back burner; if not ...

Realistically, though, I would suspect Nisus would have to be thinking of cutting PPC users loose at NWP v.2.

Whenever -- the PPC users will still need a <-> .docx translator.

Cheers

Geoff

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08:12 AM, November 20, 2008

I don' want to be forced to buy a new computer only because NisusWriter Pro 2 does probably not support PPCs anymore.

Hans

Well, I'm not setting policy at Nisus, Hans, I'm just speculating, given the march of progress.

But think of it like this -- you don't buy a "new" computer, you buy a little Macmini, used. And when you switch it on, it is virtually silent, like a REAL Mac! What a beautiful sound.

Cheers

Geoff

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06:06 AM, November 21, 2008

And very conservative speculation it is too Geoff. At the current rate of version increments for NWP v2.0 will appear in about 2012!

Hans, you're going to have to buy a new Mac sooner or later - the average upgrade cycle for Macs is every 2-3 years (for PCs it's around 18 months) and next January marks three years since the first Intel Macs were launched. There are already more Intel Macs in use than PPC Macs, the ratio is only going to increase as Mac sales continue to boom.

There are already several apps that only run on Intel Macs because making them run on PPC Macs as well would be difficult or impossible. NWP (and OO) haven't reached that point yet, but the trend is clear.

Universal apps were never intended to be more than a temporary bridge technology (like Rosetta), one day all Mac apps will be Intel only. Remember Classic mode?

The next release of Mac OS X - 10.6 aka Snow Leopard - will not run on PPC Macs, and that's due mid next year. That's a big hint from Apple. Given that both Apple and many 3rd party developers only support their software on the most recent major release of OS X and the immediately prior version (e.g. Nisus currently supports only 10.5 and 10.4.x, Apple only provides security updates for 10.5 and 10.4.x) it's pretty obvious what's going to happen by the time OS X 10.7 arrives...

greenmorpher wrote:Some day, PPC support will have to go. There are still a lot of PPC Macs around, and they will go on serving people very well for a long time, but they will be a diminishing proportion of the market. Nisus will have to ask the hard question: is continuing to serve the PPC users fully an appropriate use of our resources in light of the return?

If OO can fix their problem with translators, I guess the question will be put on the back burner; if not ...

Realistically, though, I would suspect Nisus would have to be thinking of cutting PPC users loose at NWP v.2.

Whenever -- the PPC users will still need a <-> .docx translator.

I have a five year old iBook G4 that runs NWP's latest version just fine, including translating Word documents with pretty fair speed. When my first generation MacBook needed a new hard drive from Apple, I used the iBook for a week while the MacBook was gone and it performed just fine.
As for .docx translators, the newest version of iWork runs fun on the iBook G4 and imports Office 2007 files.

And the Nisus Writer Pro original version (without the Comments feature) still runs fine on a seven year old G3 iMac.

I have Office 2004 on my iBook, MacBook and two-month-old iMac (2.66 Core 2 Duo with 2 gig RAM) and it is rather slow converting Office 2007/2008 documents even on the iMac.

(And if Nisus - and iWork - continue to develop features, I expect I'll never have to buy Office 2008.)

Gary

martin wrote:The .doc importer does take quite some time to load. It's an unfortunate characteristic of OpenOffice, which our importer is based off of, that we can't do much about. However, OpenOffice just released a new version, which we are looking to move to. Hopefully that can help in this regard.

One thing to note: it's only the first document you import that should take long to load. Subsequent documents will be converted much faster.

Although it's hard to tell what the real impact is, the converter process also allocates 800 MB of memory on my machine... Relatively speaking, it appears to be a memory hog. That might also slow it down for some users.

cyberbryce wrote:

martin wrote:The .doc importer does take quite some time to load. It's an unfortunate characteristic of OpenOffice, which our importer is based off of, that we can't do much about. However, OpenOffice just released a new version, which we are looking to move to. Hopefully that can help in this regard.

One thing to note: it's only the first document you import that should take long to load. Subsequent documents will be converted much faster.

Although it's hard to tell what the real impact is, the converter process also allocates 800 MB of memory on my machine... Relatively speaking, it appears to be a memory hog. That might also slow it down for some users.

Although I mentioned that the converter doesn't seem to take too long in NWP, the Microsoft converter for handling Word 2007/2008 .docx documents in Office 2004 really, really takes a long time, even on my 2.66 GHz iMac with 2 gig RAM. There is often a point where I wonder if it has frozen and then, suddenly, the converted document appears. And, unlike the case with NWP, the Word converter takes just as long for each subsequent document as for the first.

Gary

It used to be slow for me as well. I upgraded to 4 GB of ram, and now it is working fine. Maybe that would help?

Is there a cocoa framework or other way to access textutil ( http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/ ... til.1.html ) that could be used instead?

It's practically instantaneous for most files I've tried it with.

But textutil is just a frontend for Cocoa (and Carbon?) functionalities and they are basically the same as those used by TextEdit in its importing or exporting a document. Note that textutil’s doc file support is limited to features supported by the standard Cocoa rtf. Then, many NWP/Word features such as styles, cross-references, footnotes, comments, autnumbers, etc. will be lost or altered.