Use Nisus to annotate and index a Word doc?

[David Sharp]

I've undertaken to do some serious editing on a 17,000 word document in French that's been sent to me in Word (.docx) format.

I'll be making annotated edits and creating an index before sending it back to other members of a team, needless to say in the same Word format.

I haven't used Word for years, and quite frankly I really don't feel like plunging into its user manual to work out how to do these jobs when I'd be very much at ease when doing them in NWP.

My question is this: if I use NWP to convert the document to RTF, do all the work in Nisus and then re-export it as a .DOCX, can I be reasonably certain that my fellow team-mates will be OK with that? Or would it be safer to do everything in Word for Mac?

NB: I don't expect the work to give rise to much in the way of to-and-fro editing once I've completed it. In principle, my edit should be more or less authoritative.

Many thanks in advance for any advice

[David Sharp]

On plunging into this job, I quickly realised that my question to the forum is almost impossible to answer, since so much depends on the quality of the original Word document.

On examining the latter, I found that it was almost completely unstructured. What looked like footnotes weren't formatted as such, and no use had been made of styles. To even consider editing and annotating it, then adding an index in the original Word format, I would have had to spend far more time with the Word manual than I'm willing or able to.

Long story short: I pasted the whole thing into a properly-formatted NWP template, and spent an afternoon giving it a basic structure before getting on with the real work.

I'll be interested to see how it looks when I export it to Word at the end of the process—but I suspect it'll be easiest to send the other folks working on the project an NWP-generated PDF.

[xiamenese]

Having spent many years editing Word documents produced by people who claimed to be "experienced in using Word" but who not only knew nothing about styles but also treated TNR like a monospaced font, using spaces to create first-line indents on justified paragraphs, and who were apparently unaware that they were using a random jumble of font sizes, I feel for you. At least none of the documents (which included CVs!) I had to deal with ran to 17,000 words.

But as an NWP-user in a land of Windows, I actually sent them the RTFs produced by NWP, on the principle that (a) Word can open RTFs with no problem and (b) that it is probably the best at converting RTF to DOCX.



Mark

[martin]

I'll second the workflow recommended by Mark: use RTF to interchange files with Word whenever possible. Word has excellent support for RTF, and it should have no trouble importing an RTF file saved by Nisus Writer.

You can also Save your document as a .doc from Nisus Writer and it will actually have RTF codes inside. That achieves the same great fidelity. This may be helpful to Windows users who aren't used to seeing the RTF file extension. It's only when you use the Export menu commands to generate a DOC/DOCX that your file undergoes a conversion, which may lead to fidelity issues, depending on the complexity of your file contents.

That said, if PDF satisfies your end goals, that's even better. Nisus Writer creates excellent PDFs, and PDF was designed exactly to achieve full visual fidelity.