Working With Nisus and Pages

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deadpoets
Posts: 1
Joined: 2014-01-22 16:02:19

Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by deadpoets »

Hello all,

So, I downloaded Apple's newest version of pages for two main reasons: 1) I was having some formatting/layout translation problems in a document with heavy footnoting being shared with someone using some version of MS Word and simply wanted another word processor in the stable 2) Most importantly, I got Pages for free on my iPhone and being able to look at and edit documents on my phone while waiting for the bus is a AMAZING feature. 3) I had some credit at the Apple App store. Unfortunately, though, I still prefer to write in NWP but Apple's current version of Pages does not support RTF documents. No problem, I thought, I'll just save a given document in another format.

WRONG. Pages 5.0 keeps recognizing any and all documents I save with NWP as RTF. The only workaround I have found is to cut-and-paste whole documents between the two programs. In doing so, however, I loose some formatting and ALL footnotes. Bad bad bad bad for the doctoral dissertation that I am working on.

Anyone have any better workarounds or other thoughts on this???

Thank you!!!
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Patrick J
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Joined: 2006-06-16 16:17:50
Location: Brighton & Hove, UK
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Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by Patrick J »

I think that you will never be happy trying to get the new Pages to work with Nisus Writer.

However I have a suggestion which you may find to be far far better. That is, to use Ulysses III. You will find that you can Ulysses III with Nisus Writer very well. I recommend doing all your writing in Ulysses III then when you want to format it all in a nice way export to Nisus Writer.

Ulysses III's mobile device partnering application is Daedalus Touch. If you suss out Ulysses III first, then you could check out Daedalus Touch as well.

I was doing a lot of academic writing a couple of years ago and I did it all on Ulysses II. Ulysses II had a similar writing environment to Ulysses III, but Ulysses III is a totally rewritten application built to use iCloud. I use Ulysses III on my MacBook Pro and my MacPro and the iCloud syncing is perfect.

You will need to work out Ulysses III a bit. Once you have got the hang of it, then you might find like me that for writing long documents it is the best thing around. Best thing ever!

Ulysses uses a minimalist markup system. This means that you put in markers for styles as you write. Those markers are than used to put those styles in place when you export.

To write a long document in Ulysses you can use many many "sheets". "Sheets" are analogous to files. However you can combine all these sheets to export to a single file.

As the styles are put in by the minimalist markup I have mentioned then there is total consistency of styles across those sheets when you export. So, for example, all paragraphs marked up as Header 1 will be consistent. All words marked up to be in emphasis will be consistent.

You can export straight to Nisus Writer and it is seamless. However you cannot easily go from Nisus Writer to Ulysses III. However I suspect that once you get the hang of Ulysses III then you might find that doing the writing in Ulysses III then formatting and suchlike in Nisus Writer makes great sense. With Nisus Writer as default export app, exporting is a few clicks.
Patrick
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Patrick J
Posts: 124
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Location: Brighton & Hove, UK
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Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by Patrick J »

I will add after my previous reply that I think some people have had success getting refunds from the App Store.

I think that you could contact the relevant support and tell them that you believed Pages would export and import from RTF as the previous Pages did this. Tell them that this new Pages is useless to you because it does not have this ability and you would like a refund.
Patrick
dshan
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Joined: 2003-11-21 19:25:28
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by dshan »

The new Pages works with Nisus Writer Pro, but to transfer documents from NWP to Pages you have to use NWP's File>Export As... [.doc or .docx] format command. Don't use NWP's Save As... "Microsoft Word Format" menu command. Nisus works rather oddly in this area - File>Save As...>"Microsoft Word Format" creates a .doc file that has a .doc extension but internally is in RTF format (this is perfectly legal with MS Word, but most 3rd party apps that read .doc/.docx format files cannot handle such combination files, this includes Pages as it does not support RTF format). NWP's File>Export As... [.doc or .docx] command however creates real binary format Word files that Pages and other Word-compatible apps can handle.
dumiya
Posts: 27
Joined: 2014-01-04 23:35:50

Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by dumiya »

I had thought of converting to Word as the go between, but I did not realized that exporting the file would make it accessible to the new pages, even so without facing pages is pretty useless.
Thank you.
jnlauderdale
Posts: 3
Joined: 2006-03-26 15:21:13

Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by jnlauderdale »

Very slick and very useful. Was feeling dreary about the lack of RTF support from Apple and now you've gone and made my day.
James Lauderdale
Jtummins
Posts: 8
Joined: 2015-01-04 08:53:55

Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by Jtummins »

Moving content from Nisus Writer Pro to Pages is addressed here, but not moving from Pages to Nisus Writer Pro. I've exported a Word document from Pages (.docx) and then tried to open it with NWP. The conversion task always crashes when trying to do that. (This appears to be a bug. I don't know if that's been reported yet.)

With the crashing translator, it's not possible to move content back and forth between Pages and NWP. Has anyone found a solution to this?

Pages 5.5.1
Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.7
Þorvarður
Posts: 410
Joined: 2012-12-19 05:02:52

Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by Þorvarður »

Jtummins wrote:Moving content from Nisus Writer Pro to Pages is addressed here, but not moving from Pages to Nisus Writer Pro. I've exported a Word document from Pages (.docx) and then tried to open it with NWP. The conversion task always crashes
Have you tried to export the document in Pages as .doc (Word 1997-2004 compatible) and then open it in NWP?

I did that just now, and everything was rendered correctly: Text in Helvetica 14, all colors and attributes, footnote and a formatted table with gray header (one of those ready-made tables you can create in Pages) were correct.

Pages v 5.2.2.
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Jtummins
Posts: 8
Joined: 2015-01-04 08:53:55

Re: Working With Nisus and Pages

Post by Jtummins »

Þorvarður wrote:
Have you tried to export the document in Pages as .doc (Word 1997-2004 compatible) and then open it in NWP?
I did test the .doc file option after your suggestion. It seems to work pretty well. Text formatting, styles and URLs are translated between Pages and Nisus Writer Pro. I haven't tested any more sophisticated formatting yet.

The problems I had were seen trying to use .docx files as the transfer format.

Thank you ver much for your help.
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