3.0 Feature Request List

[Tacitus]

Hi all:

Ok I'm late to this thread so my requests have no doubt been asked before. Still here we go:

More work on footnotes. The ability to have an un-numbered footnote (= a 'true' footnote) with references in endnotes.

An outliner. The spadework is there already so this shouldn't be too difficult.

Better integration with Bookends.

Indexing and TOC?? Thinking this through I'm not sure these are needed (yet).

Logically there are three main stages in writing a paper.
1 - the outline - getting your ideas in order.
2 - cranking out the words and putting in the references,
3 - layout and production work.

For my money 3 is best done in something like Framemaker, certainly for books (please Adobe ). Nisus is then left with the goal of being a small, light, rock solid app that does the first two brilliantly and integrates well with page layout apps. I think that is what Nisus should currently aim for.

If, when this has been achieved, they want to go for everything bar the kitchen sink in a 'pro' version with more typographical stuff than you can shake a stick at, then good luck to them. Better for the moment to provide what most people want most of the time, and above all, *do it well* and keep it rock solid.

Actually I suspect this is the path Nisus is set on, although with Mellel breathing down their necks they can't afford to stand still. Me, I still prefer NWE - what it does it does well and for the present I can live with its limitations.

Tacitus

[dhlr1]

The macro menu is great: nice if there was one like the old remove gremlins.

[JBL]

Logically there are three main stages in writing a paper.
1 - the outline - getting your ideas in order.
2 - cranking out the words and putting in the references,
3 - layout and production work.

For me at least, there is also 2.5, send your paper to co-authors for comments/revisions, 2.6 review co-authors comments/revisions, and 2.7, fight with co-authors about comments/revisions.

A major strength of Nisus for me is that, because it uses rtf as its main format, my co-authors can open manuscripts in Word and if they don't make the effort to change the document type I get back something in rtf. Unfortunately, I am increasingly having trouble beating my co-authors out of the habit of turning on track changes and using comments. As a result I have been spending a lot of time in Word, which I hate. I realize I earlier voted for including better graphics support before tackling change tracking and comments but I am changing my vote. I'd really like to see change tracking and comments in version 3.

[Tacitus]

For me at least, there is also 2.5, send your paper to co-authors for comments/revisions, 2.6 review co-authors comments/revisions, and 2.7, fight with co-authors about comments/revisions.

It's not a problem I have very often. Whenever I have needed comments they are usually done in coloured text within the body text without using change tracking in Word. So for me they come back OK - or have done so far.

Tacitus

[joehardy]

For me at least, there is also 2.5, send your paper to co-authors for comments/revisions, 2.6 review co-authors comments/revisions, and 2.7, fight with co-authors about comments/revisions.

It's not a problem I have very often. Whenever I have needed comments they are usually done in coloured text within the body text without using change tracking in Word. So for me they come back OK - or have done so far.

Tacitus

Thankfully, I only run into this if submitting an academic paper to a peer-reviewed journal. That's not often. For the more common papers I present at conferences I simply e-mail or give hard copies to associates to proofread and comment upon.

[Candace]

New to NWE, I beg that you give it what I thought were the basics in Nisus Classic and never suspected would not be in NWE:
TOC and index - cannot live without them. Am going to have to return to old iMac and Nisus Classic.
Visible vertical rulers.
Visible tabs on top bar.
Visible space bars.

It was so easy to set spacing, etc. in Nisus Classic. So far, I've got no clue how to do it for more than a paragraph in NWE. Also, changing fonts for selected text seems a lot harder.
Also haven't yet figured out how to set tabs. Maybe there's a good way to do it in NWE, but could you make it a little easier?
I was a happy, competent, powerful user in Nisus Classic, although I'm sure I never used 1/2 of its fabulous features. I'm finding NWE pretty tough.

Also, I thought one of the main features of NWE was seamless saving to Word and PDF. When I save to those formats, I lose a little formatting, and more important, I lose all my page numbers.

thanks.

[JBL]

Also, I thought one of the main features of NWE was seamless saving to Word

Just a quick comment on this... just send people using Word rtf. Word sees rtf files and they look just like they do in NWE and then when they save the file Word automatically saves them as rtf. I have been doing this with a couple people and they didn't even know I was sending them rtf instead of doc format. That is what seamless interchange with Word is all about.

[Candace]

Thanks, JBL. I will give it a try.

[philippe99]

Hi everybody.

On the french based 'la-liste-nisus' Yahoo discussion list on NisusWriter, we made a little brainstorming about the wanted features for the 3.0
Here they are:

1. an outliner
2. more facilities (? like the GraphicLayer ?) for mixing images and text
3. the capility to attached notes to words or to anchors within the text (like in Words)
4. the ability to index specific words which have to be included in the index of the document.
5. a glossary
6. be able to play with a personal dictionnary
7. the japanese "rubi" function (??) which allow to write above a word very rarely used a pronounciation in either the hiragana or katakana writing system
8. Better integration with Antidote Prisme spellchecker software
9. Better filters for Word import, HTML export
10. Following-up of the modifications like in Word
11. Search/replace through style/attributes used in the document


Regards
Philippe
http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/la-liste-nisus/

[Patrick J]

I think my feature requests are as follows:

• Find/Replace being styles aware.
• Find/Replace having Macroise function (that would be Macroize in US). This was in Nisus Writer Classic of course and I think it was invented by Joe Kissell. To be honest I haven’t looked at the Perl scripting yet so I don’t know if Find/Replace expressions can scripted in there yet.
• Make it possible to remove bundled macros from macro menu.
• Increase AppleScript support so that, for example, the margins can be set by AppleScript.
• Make it possible to change hyperlinks from blue and underline to something else (in other words have a “hyperlink style” (like in Word).
• Introduce automatically updating styles (like in Word).
• Introduce a “no wrap” possibility in the Draft View. This is great for all kinds of things imho, like making long documents very easy to scroll through to the right bit. Very cool indeed would be to have a “wrap this para” function so a selected para would wrap against the window.

In the longer term I think a graphics layer would be nice but it would be much better if possible to make progress with the text editing.

[Mark XM]

I must admit I'm glad I'm not there in Nisus having to decide amongst all the competing wish lists for NWE.

Lots of you want this for macros, that for macros ... I have never found a need for macros, I prefer document templates. So rather than macros, I would like to see an "open from template" accessing a specific folder where the templates are stored.

And I, on the other hand, really want the ability to flow text round graphics ... OK I can do it in InDesign, but on many occasions my needs would be met just as well through the ability in NWE ...

And in terms of Word compatibility, my only problem is NWE not being able to read Word graphics.

But yes, a style-sensitive search and replace ... yes please!

Mark

[Patrick J]

I would like to see an "open from template" accessing a specific folder where the templates are stored.

Yes like you I'd like this. Like you I don't envy the people at Nisus with this great endless list of feature requests. One of the causes of such a long list is that Nisus Writer Classic was so extremely capable.

With Nisus Writer Classic there was an "Essential Files" sub-menu in the "File" menu and you could add to this whatever you liked. This sub-menu was suitable for templates of various sorts.

I have created something similar in the Macro menu of Nisus Writer Express. I use very simple AppleScripts to open the relevant template files. To give you an idea of how simple these scripts are here is an example:

Code: Select all

tell application "Nisus Writer Express"
	open "Macintosh HD:Users:patrick:Library:Application Support:Nisus Writer:Templates:No Para Spacing.dot"
end tell

This one is to open a template called "No Para Spacing.dot".

I keep my templates in a folder I created called "Templates" inside "Nisus Writer" folder inside "Application Support" folder inside "Library" folder inside my user folder which is called patrick.

To write the script just open the Script Editor application type out the macro with the right file path to your saved template file, then save the script with file format "Script" in your Macros folder for Nisus Writer Express.

You can create a sub-folder in the Macros folder dedicated to these scripts to open templates. Nisus already has a folder there called "templates" (for Perl script templates) but you could create a new folder called, perhaps "My Templates". Then put the AppleScripts in that.

A cool thing about this is that just like with Nisus Writer Classic I can assign keyboard short-cuts to the menu item that runs the script. The script above is called "No Para Spacing" so I have assigned keyboard short-cut command NPS.

[Mark XM]

One of the causes of such a long list is that Nisus Writer Classic was so extremely capable.

I had Nisus Writer, from a very early version. However, I regret to say, that even though I knew how powerful it was, I never used it as my main word-processor. Main reasons were having to work with Word for Windows users so much, and since I was given Word I used that; then I preferred the printouts produced by Word, they seemed cleaner with better kerning and tracking; and I could never get the styles to work properly.

With Nisus Writer Classic there was an "Essential Files" sub-menu in the "File" menu and you could add to this whatever you liked. This sub-menu was suitable for templates of various sorts.

Yes, I know, it is exactly that sort of thing that is right at the top of my priority list for NWE.

I have created something similar in the Macro menu of Nisus Writer Express. I use very simple AppleScripts to open the relevant template files.
<snip>
A cool thing about this is that just like with Nisus Writer Classic I can assign keyboard short-cuts to the menu item that runs the script. The script above is called "No Para Spacing" so I have assigned keyboard short-cut command NPS.

Thanks very much for this. I have never thought of using Macros for this. I have always thought of them as automating text-processing in some way, something that doesn't really fit my needs. The only macro I tried, Number/Renumber Lines, was disappointing 'cos it numbered paragraphs rather than lines, so I have basically ignored them since.

I tried putting copies of my templates in the Document Manager to do it that way, but for some reason I have lost them, and I can't remember how I did it, nor could I find the Document Manager folder on disk ... as it was empty at the time I looked for it, so maybe it didn't actually exist.

I'll try your solution when I have a moment.

Mark

[martin]

nor could I find the Document Manager folder on disk ... as it was empty at the time I looked for it, so maybe it didn't actually exist.

The Document Manager folder is located in your home directory at:

~/Documents/Nisus Documents/

and should be created automatically when you start Express. If not, you can always create an empty folder with the same name and Express will start using it.

[Mark XM]

nor could I find the Document Manager folder on disk ... as it was empty at the time I looked for it, so maybe it didn't actually exist.

The Document Manager folder is located in your home directory at:

~/Documents/Nisus Documents/

and should be created automatically when you start Express. If not, you can always create an empty folder with the same name and Express will start using it.

Very odd! My ~/Documents/Nisus Documents/ contains:
* an empty folder called "Backups" which I must have put there at some point;
* a folder called "Crash Logs" into which I have saved any crash logs that I have retrieved from the console or the Apple crash reporter, when that has come up, to send on to you;
* a file "RECOVERED ... Yunnan" which appears currently in the Document Manager, as it was the back-up file as last saved when NWE crashed the other day.

But there is no Document Manager folder ... nor could I find one anywhere else through spotlight! I'll create one in that location as you suggest, move that RECOVERED file into it and copies of my various templates and see what happens.

Many thanks.

Mark

Later edit: Things that make you go "hmmm!"

I created ~/Documents/Nisus Documents/Document Manager/

Then I moved the RECOVERED file into it and copies of three templates. I opened NWE, had a look at the Document Manager ... completely empty!

I moved the files back within ~/Documents/Nisus Documents/ itself

opened NWE and checked the Document Manager ... there they all were!

Curious ... but I now know where to put copies of templates so that I can access them through the document manager!

M