Posted: 2006-05-01 17:11:21
We do have that special gemboyishness!
Jzents wrote:In what way do you find Nisus any easier to use here than any other app? I too often need Greek with accents. I just use the keyboard pallet and SIL Greek fonts which have the characters combined with the accents. Then I just pick the correct character/accent combination and presto. How are you doing it in Nisus? Thank you!The Antiquarian wrote:One word: unicode. I stuck with Mellel for a while because I discovered unicode (when Word for Mac didn't support it) and saw that it was the future of computing for those using non-Roman alphabets; at the time, NWE was very basic (didn't even do footnotes). But as I discovered more about unicode, I also discovered Mellel's less than perfect implementation of it. Specifically, combining diacriticals will not work with left-to-right languages, at least with the unicode font that comes built-in with OS X (Lucida Grande). Sometimes I just have to use them - and the last straw came when I had to use TextEdit (!) to make a teaching handout because Mellel, 'designed especially for scholars' as they tell us, could not make the combined characters I needed for my class on ancient Greek accentuation. As I wrote to them, there is no feature more important to the scholars I know than the simple ability to produce the correct characters with the correct diacritical signs. (Even the current version of Word for Mac can't do these unicode combining characters, nor - surprisingly enough - could Pages 1: I haven't tried Pages 2.) So I switched to NWE, which of course can manage all this, and since then have seen the further important advantage it enjoys of .rtf file format.
OK, I can see that. I mostly work with classical Greek for philosophy or Koine for NT work. So I would not need what you are needing. But I played a bit in Nisus and could not see how you are combining two or more characters in one 'space'. Could you enlighten me on that point? Cheers and thank you!The Antiquarian wrote:Jzents wrote:In what way do you find Nisus any easier to use here than any other app? I too often need Greek with accents. I just use the keyboard pallet and SIL Greek fonts which have the characters combined with the accents. Then I just pick the correct character/accent combination and presto. How are you doing it in Nisus? Thank you!The Antiquarian wrote:One word: unicode. I stuck with Mellel for a while because I discovered unicode (when Word for Mac didn't support it) and saw that it was the future of computing for those using non-Roman alphabets; at the time, NWE was very basic (didn't even do footnotes). But as I discovered more about unicode, I also discovered Mellel's less than perfect implementation of it. Specifically, combining diacriticals will not work with left-to-right languages, at least with the unicode font that comes built-in with OS X (Lucida Grande). Sometimes I just have to use them - and the last straw came when I had to use TextEdit (!) to make a teaching handout because Mellel, 'designed especially for scholars' as they tell us, could not make the combined characters I needed for my class on ancient Greek accentuation. As I wrote to them, there is no feature more important to the scholars I know than the simple ability to produce the correct characters with the correct diacritical signs. (Even the current version of Word for Mac can't do these unicode combining characters, nor - surprisingly enough - could Pages 1: I haven't tried Pages 2.) So I switched to NWE, which of course can manage all this, and since then have seen the further important advantage it enjoys of .rtf file format.
The distinction to be made is between Greek with precomposed diacriticals and with combining diacriticals. For most uses of ancient Greek, the precomposed versions are fine - and so can be handled adequately by Mellel or Word. However, not all diacriticals that I need in my work come in precomposed versions, and for these you need to be able to use combining diacriticals. As an example, you may need an alpha with a smooth breathing and an acute - no problem, there is a unique unicode "code point" for this combination. However, say you wanted to be able to add a macron to that combination, or put a circumflex over an omicron or epsilon, or a sublinear dot beneath a Greek letter: because these are not things you normally need in printed Greek literary texts, there are no precomposed glyphs for them, and you have to use combining diacriticals. My point was that NWE can handle these, while Mellel cannot. You can read more about the general issue of precomposed vs combining diacriticals here: <a href="http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicod ... omposed</a>
The simplest way to access these combining diacriticals is through the Character Palette (I'm using OS X 10.3.9). For example, first type a Greek letter in Lucida Grande, then open Character Palette, setting the view to "Glyph", and the font to Lucida Grande. Scroll down to the row that begins 00380 (these are just a few of the dozens of combining characters available - play around with Character Palette!). Then double click on one of the diacriticals and it will combine with the Greek letter. If you try this with both NWE and Mellel you will see how much better the former is - particularly noticeable with a letter which already has a diacritical over it - and in fact even TextEdit can do this properly. In fairness, I should point out that Mellel has improved; in some cases it will work (sort of) with Lucida Grande, but when I first noticed a problem with it (in June last year) the product wouldn't do this at all with the Mac's in-built comprehensive Unicode font. As I said in my original post, this failure was my main reason for moving to NWE, and Mellel's implementation of this valuable Unicode feature is still unacceptable IMHO. Hope this helps!Jzents wrote:OK, I can see that. I mostly work with classical Greek for philosophy or Koine for NT work. So I would not need what you are needing. But I played a bit in Nisus and could not see how you are combining two or more characters in one 'space'. Could you enlighten me on that point? Cheers and thank you!The Antiquarian wrote:Jzents wrote: In what way do you find Nisus any easier to use here than any other app? I too often need Greek with accents. I just use the keyboard pallet and SIL Greek fonts which have the characters combined with the accents. Then I just pick the correct character/accent combination and presto. How are you doing it in Nisus? Thank you!
The distinction to be made is between Greek with precomposed diacriticals and with combining diacriticals. For most uses of ancient Greek, the precomposed versions are fine - and so can be handled adequately by Mellel or Word. However, not all diacriticals that I need in my work come in precomposed versions, and for these you need to be able to use combining diacriticals. As an example, you may need an alpha with a smooth breathing and an acute - no problem, there is a unique unicode "code point" for this combination. However, say you wanted to be able to add a macron to that combination, or put a circumflex over an omicron or epsilon, or a sublinear dot beneath a Greek letter: because these are not things you normally need in printed Greek literary texts, there are no precomposed glyphs for them, and you have to use combining diacriticals. My point was that NWE can handle these, while Mellel cannot. You can read more about the general issue of precomposed vs combining diacriticals here: <a href="http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicod ... omposed</a>
Thank you for the detailed reply. I shall do some experimenting with this just to get the hang of it and to notice the differences. Thank you for your time, it is much appreciated. Cheers!The Antiquarian wrote:The simplest way to access these combining diacriticals is through the Character Palette (I'm using OS X 10.3.9). For example, first type a Greek letter in Lucida Grande, then open Character Palette, setting the view to "Glyph", and the font to Lucida Grande. Scroll down to the row that begins 00380 (these are just a few of the dozens of combining characters available - play around with Character Palette!). Then double click on one of the diacriticals and it will combine with the Greek letter. If you try this with both NWE and Mellel you will see how much better the former is - particularly noticeable with a letter which already has a diacritical over it - and in fact even TextEdit can do this properly. In fairness, I should point out that Mellel has improved; in some cases it will work (sort of) with Lucida Grande, but when I first noticed a problem with it (in June last year) the product wouldn't do this at all with the Mac's in-built comprehensive Unicode font. As I said in my original post, this failure was my main reason for moving to NWE, and Mellel's implementation of this valuable Unicode feature is still unacceptable IMHO. Hope this helps!Jzents wrote:OK, I can see that. I mostly work with classical Greek for philosophy or Koine for NT work. So I would not need what you are needing. But I played a bit in Nisus and could not see how you are combining two or more characters in one 'space'. Could you enlighten me on that point? Cheers and thank you!The Antiquarian wrote:
The distinction to be made is between Greek with precomposed diacriticals and with combining diacriticals. For most uses of ancient Greek, the precomposed versions are fine - and so can be handled adequately by Mellel or Word. However, not all diacriticals that I need in my work come in precomposed versions, and for these you need to be able to use combining diacriticals. As an example, you may need an alpha with a smooth breathing and an acute - no problem, there is a unique unicode "code point" for this combination. However, say you wanted to be able to add a macron to that combination, or put a circumflex over an omicron or epsilon, or a sublinear dot beneath a Greek letter: because these are not things you normally need in printed Greek literary texts, there are no precomposed glyphs for them, and you have to use combining diacriticals. My point was that NWE can handle these, while Mellel cannot. You can read more about the general issue of precomposed vs combining diacriticals here: <a href="http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicod ... omposed</a>
SpellCatcher has a great Auto-Complete feature, which they call Shortcuts.Jzents wrote:Nisus will auto correct my common misspellings e.g., t e h for the, which Mellel does not currently do. Unfortunately, neither has the great auto-complete feature that Neo/OpenOffice does. The current implementation of that in Nisus is not usable.
because sometimes things which are real powerful aren't possible to be only simple? btw mellel's styles are not that complicated, they're not simple that's true, but they are real brilliant if you make more than writing letters.cgc wrote:We don't have to learn Mellel's styles (which aren't complicated but why should word processing be anything other than simple).
Agree on that.Reiner wrote:because sometimes things which are real powerful aren't possible to be only simple? btw mellel's styles are not that complicated, they're not simple that's true, but they are real brilliant if you make more than writing letters.cgc wrote:We don't have to learn Mellel's styles (which aren't complicated but why should word processing be anything other than simple).