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German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-10-13 14:04:23
by wawe26
Hi

I' am new in this forum.

We are using Nisus in our law firm in Switzerland for many years. We used Nisus Classic as long as possible under OS 9. We moved to OS X with Nisus Writer Pro coming.
We are all writing in German, With Nisus Classic we had a very good text control. Now we have three problems with Nisus Writer Pro 1.4. and Snow Leopard Server.

1. Hyphenation
Under OS X Nisus uses the text engine from Apple. The german hyphenation is terrible. I know, that you posted a solution with soft hyphenation. But in our practical work (especially for the secretariy) this is bot very helpful. You have always to control the whole document, if there is a wrong hyphenation and then change it by hand. In Word and Mellel there exists a good hyphenation control. Is there a possibility to improve the situation, since Apple not really seems to be interested in improving the text engine concerning german hyphenation.

2. Nisus Documents on a server
Our firm has all Nisus Douments on a mac mini server. So everybody has access to all the documents. Now we realiesed, that there is no information or control by nisus, when two or morepersons try to change a Nisus-Document at the same time. Is there a possibility to prevent, that somebody has access to a Nisus file, when it ist already open and in use? This would be important, because otherwise some newer writing could be lost.

3. Impossible Saving
Sometimes (we dont know why) you get the information, that you can not save the document (anymore) on the server, because the document (that ist opened) does not exist (so the information). You have then to save on the local machine, restart Nisus an reopen the document from the local machine. Then you can save on the server again.

Thanks for helpful answers

Peter

By the way: I would be very interested by getting in a direct contact with other german or swiss german Nisus-users. If somebody is interested too, then I would be happy to get a message directly.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-10-14 12:04:04
by martin
Hello Peter, and welcome to the forums!
wawe26 wrote:Under OS X Nisus uses the text engine from Apple. The german hyphenation is terrible. I know, that you posted a solution with soft hyphenation. But in our practical work (especially for the secretariy) this is bot very helpful. You have always to control the whole document, if there is a wrong hyphenation and then change it by hand. In Word and Mellel there exists a good hyphenation control. Is there a possibility to improve the situation, since Apple not really seems to be interested in improving the text engine concerning german hyphenation.
What you say is correct: Nisus relies on the Apple/OSX hyphenation engine, which apparently isn't very good with non-English text. This is something we might be able to augment/improve, but it would take some work. It's definitely on our list of possible future enhancements.
2. Nisus Documents on a server
Our firm has all Nisus Douments on a mac mini server. So everybody has access to all the documents. Now we realiesed, that there is no information or control by nisus, when two or morepersons try to change a Nisus-Document at the same time. Is there a possibility to prevent, that somebody has access to a Nisus file, when it ist already open and in use? This would be important, because otherwise some newer writing could be lost.
Right now when Nisus Writer opens a document for editing, it does not lock the file. That's an enhancement/option we could add, and I'll make sure we have it filed.
3. Impossible Saving
Sometimes (we dont know why) you get the information, that you can not save the document (anymore) on the server, because the document (that ist opened) does not exist (so the information). You have then to save on the local machine, restart Nisus an reopen the document from the local machine. Then you can save on the server again.
That error message is displayed by Apple's document framework, and it's behavior is not transparent to us. Apple has some kind of automatic document location tracking/sensing built-in which normally works well. I wonder if the errant warning is related to two users saving over a single copy of the file (on your server) at once, or perhaps some kind of intermittent hiccup in the network connection.

We'd need more information from you on what triggers the unwanted error before we could hope to diagnose the problem or do anything about it, and even then we might not get far in fixing this Apple feature, though we might be able to pass the bug report along to them.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-10-14 12:25:06
by wawe26
Dear Martin
Thank you very much for your prompt reply. I will try to get more informations concerning the saving-problem.
To the hyphenation: I have some problems to explain to the people in the office, why other programs have special tools for hyphenation and we have not. That's why regularly comes the idea, to move to Word. I hope, I can convince them again and again with other advantages of Nisus and the argument, that we better support a Mac-Software.
Yours Peter

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-10-15 01:59:20
by Groucho
martin wrote:This is something we might be able to augment/improve, but it would take some work. It's definitely on our list of possible future enhancements.
I’m looking forward to exactly this, Martin. Please push it very high on the list. There’s many a way around a lot of shortcomings, but there’s nothing you can do when it comes to dealing with the wrong hyphenation pattern. Occasionally, when I print some Italian or Spanish text, I go through the document and place soft-hyphens where appropriate. It’s an annoying task, though, and most times I prefer exporting to Open Office or Pages.

Greetings, Henry.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-10 09:06:20
by Anne Cuneo
Maybe this is a bit late to join the conversation, and it's about French hyphenation.
I have just written a huge book (a historical novel, 1'000'000 characters), and in order to have a more compact and regular general view of the text, I activated automatic hyphenation, which is not that good in French either – in fact, it's actually very bad. I didn't bother to uncheck it when I gave it to the publisher, because I thought this was «soft hyphenation», and wouldn't keep if the text was opened in X-Press. Alas, it did keep! We all noticed too late, and it was a hell of a job to correct all the wrong hyphens (and there are a lot, when the rule used is that of English). The book has now been published, I am sure there are hyphenation mistakes still…
How come the hyphens stay? I am sure there was a time they didn't. Or am I doing something wrong?

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-10 10:45:51
by martin
Anne Cuneo wrote:How come the hyphens stay? I am sure there was a time they didn't. Or am I doing something wrong?
Did you import your document into Quark using PDF? If so, then it makes sense that the hyphenations would remain. PDF is a format that largely works by recording precisely what to display, and is less concerned with the logical flow and identity of the content. Since you had hyphenation turned on when you made the PDF, it recorded those hyphens as something that needed to be displayed. I hope that makes some sense.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-16 14:12:29
by Anne Cuneo
Did you import your document into Quark using PDF?
Come on, Martin! I would never do that! I hadn't even noticed it was possible!
No, I send the Nisus .rtf file to my publisher, who does not have Nisus (I have never been able to convert him to it), he opens the .rtf in Word, and from there goes to x-Press. I just checked. I sent him Nisus texts with hyphenation on in Nisus classic, and the hyphenation disappeared in x-Press. I have written quite a few books since, but none so long, so I suppose I never turned hyphenation on since we have been on Nisus Writer Pro, until this time.
My experience means, to cut a long story short, that the Nisus Pro hyphenation is not “soft” at all, it is there to stay, which means we had better not use it when writing for the presses in a language other than English.
Am I right, or am I right?

:wink:

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-16 14:39:20
by martin
Anne Cuneo wrote:My experience means, to cut a long story short, that the Nisus Pro hyphenation is not “soft” at all, it is there to stay, which means we had better not use it when writing for the presses in a language other than English.
Am I right, or am I right?

:wink:
Well, perhaps in this case let's just say you're less right than usual :P

The hyphenation saved by NWP in RTF files is "soft" in the sense you mean: it's a setting that applies to the whole document, and can be turned on/off globally, either in NWP or Word. We definitely do not insert hyphen characters into your text. So likely your publisher opened the file in Word, didn't turn off the hyphenation, exported it, and wound up with them in Quark.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-17 11:58:11
by Anne Cuneo
I just want to clarify this, Martin: under «soft» hyphen, one used to understand an hyphen which would disappear automatically when uploaded in another format that Nisus supported if the way the words were on the page did not ask for it. Now it's different: hyphens are not soft any longer. When they are checked, the checking goes through the translation. It was not so in Nisus Classic, and I suppose I never used an hyphenated text where it counts since – until this time.
This means we who write in French, German and whatever language had better not mess around hyphens, in our languages the hyphenation is plain terrible.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-17 12:22:41
by martin
Anne Cuneo wrote:I just want to clarify this, Martin: under «soft» hyphen, one used to understand an hyphen which would disappear automatically when uploaded in another format that Nisus supported if the way the words were on the page did not ask for it. Now it's different: hyphens are not soft any longer. When they are checked, the checking goes through the translation. It was not so in Nisus Classic
It may be different than it was with Classic (I don't know how Classic and Word communicated back in the OS9 days), but the situation now is pretty good. Let me see if I can't clarify it for you.

When you turn on hyphenation in NWP (eg: via the menu View > Hyphenation > Normal), it turns on automatic hyphenation for the whole document. Hyphen characters are not actually inserted into your text at this point, it's merely a display/layout option. When you save this document (eg: as RTF) the hyphenation option is stored in the file. When you open the file in Word, the setting is detected and hyphenation occurs there too, and likewise it's a global option (in Word you can turn it on/off via the menu Tools > Hyphenation). This is all as it should be; preserving display settings is a good thing.

The problem for you likely arises once your publisher decides to export the content from Word into Quark. If they leave hyphenation turned on in Word, and make a PDF for Quark, then the hyphens are at this point inserted as characters into the text. If no hyphens are desired, that option should be turned off before final export.

Perhaps Classic's hyphenation option didn't import at all into Word/Quark back in the OS9 days, and maybe that worked better for you, but hopefully you can see that having document options be preserved between NWP and Word is a good thing.

Let me know if anything is still unclear, or I'm missing something.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-18 00:10:10
by Anne Cuneo
Thank you, Martin, it is now quite clear: the confusion arose from the fact that I had not used Hyphenation for a long time, and thought it would turn itself off automatically if exported to Word or Quark X Press, whereas I should have turned it off myself before giving the text any further. One lives to learn!

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-18 09:27:01
by Groucho
Anne,

Are you sure the language attribute was set as French? Maybe it was English and you forget to change it. Hence the use of an English hyphenation pattern in InDesign. Even though NWP makes no practical difference, when it comes to hyphenation, between US English and any other language, other programs do.

Cheers, Henry.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-20 01:52:09
by Anne Cuneo
Are you sure the language attribute was set as French?
Yes, I am sure.

I use the original English interface of Nisus, I have French checked in the Language palette. Nevertheless, I once changed to the French interface in order to check about the hyphenation, even though I don't really like that French interface, because it offers too many confusing translations. Anyway, it does not change anything. I think there is no way of using any other hyphenation than the English. I could of course try to have the whole OS in French, which I never did, to check if something changes, but it's complicated, and I don't quite feel up to it… I'd rather stop using hyphenation at all. Simpler that way.

Re: German Hyphenation / Nisus Documents on Server

Posted: 2011-11-20 03:26:08
by Groucho
The Mac text engine only has one hyphenation pattern file. No way out of that. If you want to check, this is the path to the file:

System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources/English-Hyphenation.txt

Henry.

Re: German Hyphenation

Posted: 2011-12-20 02:37:18
by wawe26
The problem remains: For a german user Apples hyphenation is terrible.
We are four lawyers and we have to check every dictated Nisus-document, if there are some faults. And there are always (embarrassing) faults.
This causes a lot of daily workt for our secretaries and for us. We would not have this, if there would exist a serious solution from Nisus itself (or somebody else).
Unfortunately the German Word (and Mellel) has a good solution. And as far as I can see, there is no workaround with a third-party solution. We would even pay for such a tool, but I did not find something until today.

Yours sincerely

Peter

PS I renew my demand in this forum, if there are other swiss oder german users, that are interested to discuss solutions for German Nisus users.