Nisus Writer Pro 1.3 is now available

[greenmorpher]

Hello Martin

I've just been scouring through the release notes and I see the entry:

Changed: autosave should not be activated for empty new documents.

That is exactly the opposite of the behaviour I would like. I WANT autosave to save me from possible embarrassment of losing stuff.

What that means is that although I have autosave switched on in the preferences, it won't work by default under *after* I save initially?

Sorry, Martin, that's the wrong way about. Can that be reversed, please, as per my previous post, and a long established, superior capability of NW returned to NWPro?

Many thanks for your consideration.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad Doctor Online

Win business with the recession-busting "How to make great ads for (sm)all business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". See http://www.worsleypress.com

[xiamenese]

Geoff,

While I understand your problem, how is NW going to know that you're not just returning to edit the file that you have opened anew? Do you want it to do that for every single file that you open? I think that would drive me mad. I've made the same mistake as you in the past, but I note that if you choose "Open" from the file menu, rather than doing it from "Open recent" or double-clicking the document in the Finder, one of the options you are presented with is "Open as new file". Can you not save yourself some heartache that way? If I wanted to write a new document on the basis of one that I'd already produced, that's what I'd do.

Mark

[Kino]

I think this would not be a bad solution if something indicating the writability of the document were available in the tool bar or in the status bar... (feature request ! ;-)

The proxy icon (in the document window's title bar) shows a padlock when a document is read only.

You seem to confuse Read Only and Locked. What I mean by writable and unwritable is the settings under "Sharing & Permissions" of the Finder's Info panel.

In earlier versions of OS X and in a sense, Locked was more secure (and much more troublemaking ;-). However, in Leopard, you can trash a locked file and empty the Trash. AFAIK the only advantage of a locked file over an unwritable (read only) file is that you cannot move the former but into the Trash. That is a disadvantage for my way of file management at least.

[martin]

Changed: autosave should not be activated for empty new documents.

That is exactly the opposite of the behaviour I would like. I WANT autosave to save me from possible embarrassment of losing stuff.

What that means is that although I have autosave switched on in the preferences, it won't work by default under *after* I save initially?

No, absolutely not. It means autosave won't kick in for documents that have zero content, eg: are completely empty. If you haven't typed anything, there's no reason to save it.

[Anne Cuneo]

Well, I would have made my usual vertical ruler gag, but Martin launched a preemptive strike there, and being somehow ashamed, I am sure, that one of the original features, which people ask for again and again, is still missing, he thought that if he mentioned it we would no longer think about poor missing vertical ruler.
Tell me Martin: why is it that from update to update, a feature so many of us would like to see is not there? A feature you YOURSELF invented! I'm curious, really. It has been possible in Nisus Classic. What is the problem here?

Apart from that, nice update, thank you. Personally, to pick up the thread where it was, I am very happy empty documents are not saved. My file manager was cluttered with new documents, which I had opened, forgotten, and then not needed.

[greenmorpher]

Hello Anne

I'm not suggesting NWP should save empty documents; I'm asking it to incorporate another of the features which Nisus invented and which was such a mainstay of the original Nisus -- a reminder to you to save that new document early in the piece. With autosave set, Nisus would wqait until it was time to save, then come up with a warning that it was time to save. Once you had saved, Nisus's autosave would continue the saving automatically.

Along with a return to that functionality, I would like to see an extension of it -- with autosave set, you re-open a document you had worked on earlier. You start work and autosave kicks in. In my case, it is set to overwrite the existing document. I would like to see a warning pop up that it was about to save and overwrite the existing document -- would I like to save as to a new document, thus preserving the existing one? In some cases, yes I would. In other cases -- no, just go ahead.

Something else -- autosave now operates on a time basis. In my case, I;'ve set it to every 5 minutes. Didn't the original Nisus offer us a choice of time or keystrokes? Or maybe that was something else. Keystrokes is better, I think.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad Doctor Online

Win business with the recession-busting "How to make great ads for (sm)all business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". See http://www.worsleypress.com

[ptram]

...poor missing vertical ruler...

I might have asked this before, but... please, with an option to only see the horizontal one alone. I like a clean display, with only the old typewriter ruler and the clicking of the keys going.

And, if only those distracting aqua-blue tab stops could be made an anonymous grey...

Paolo

[greenmorpher]

FEATURE REQUEST -- font menu

And a decently colorful font display in the Format > Font menu -- add the different formats, and colour those formats differently.

Give me as many favourites as I want -- not just five. I don't want to use them in the same document -- but I do want to use different fonts in different documents, and I often work on many different documents in a day.

Make the background to the font menu lighter -- preferably white -- and give clearer boundaries between the different parts of it.

Allow me to unclutter my font menu by dismissing all those systems fonts and stuff in other languages that I don't want, to the bottom of the menu (or not having them present at all).

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad Doctor Online

Win business with the recession-busting "How to make great ads for (sm)all business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". See http://www.worsleypress.com

[Kino]

And, if only those distracting aqua-blue tab stops could be made an anonymous grey...

Ah, you are right!

Those icons are stored in Nisus Writer Pro.app/Contents/Resources/Themes/Aqua/. You can modifies tiff files in it with a graphic utility such as Preview.

Here is a set of sample tiff files I made by modifying the originals with ToyViewer. If you try it, please create a copy of Nisus Writer Pro.app and keep it in a safe place before replacing icons.

GraphiteIcons.zip

(7.17 KiB) Downloaded 529 times

First of all, unzip GraphiteIcons.zip and look at icon files in it. In addition to tiff files for indent icons, you will find tb_Forward.tiff and tb_Backward.tiff in grey which are for Back and Forward (Toolbar items). If you find them acceptable...

1. Using Finder’s Show Package Contents (contextual menu command), open Nisus Writer Pro.app/Contents/Resources/Themes/.

2a. If you have set Appearance to Graphite in System Preferences, put GraphiteIcons.zip’s Graphite folder under NW Pro’s Themes folder. (This works. I happened to discover it.) Perhaps you’d better copy ToolButton*.tiff files from Aqua folder to Graphite folder.

2b. If you have set Appearance to Blue, put files in GraphiteIcons.zip’s Graphite folder in NW Pro’s Aqua folder to replace files of the same name.

3. Put files in GraphiteIcons.zip’s Resources folder in Nisus Writer Pro.app/Contents/Resources/ to replace files of the same name.

Changes will take effect when you relaunch NW Pro.

[ptram]

Kino, thank you very much! Graphite icons work much better.
Paolo

[exegete77]

Very nice, Kino. Thank you!

[greenmorpher]

Just wait, you guys, until you are gray haired. Yo uwon't want gray ikons then! "Add color," you will cry, "so I can see the blasted things!"



Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad Doctor Online

Win business with the recession-busting "How to make great ads for (sm)all business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". See http://www.worsleypress.com

[exegete77]

Just wait, you guys, until you are gray haired. You won't want gray ikons then! "Add color," you will cry, "so I can see the blasted things!"



Cheers, Geoff

Ha! My grandkids tease me about my gray hair, well, that and the lack of hair already!