Nisus Writer Express 4.0 Release Notes

This is a major new version that adds many new features and enhancements.

New Features

• Palette system redesigned with improved look, feel, and behavior.
  - Enhanced existing palettes, added new palettes, and improved customizability.
  - The palettes are no longer required to be in a drawer, but can float freely in a separate window.
• Improvements to Draft View's full screen mode:
  - Easily accessible options bar auto-shows with the main menu.
  - Ability to show (or hide) the status bar and word count.
  - Focus mode option to dim inactive text.
• Cloud sync (iCloud or Dropbox) for nearly all settings, including: general preferences, keyboard shortcuts, QuickFix, templates, glossaries, style library, etc.
• All icons updated for high-resolution Retina displays.
• Typewriter scrolling, which optionally keeps the selection a specified distance down the page while typing.
• Faster when editing long and complex documents. See the Optimizations below.
• Text statistics include tables, footnotes, and endnotes. This is the new default but can be disabled.
• Paragraph styles can enforce a page break before the paragraph text.
• Footnotes, endnotes, and section notes are now editable at the end of Draft View.
• New Formatting Examiner palette:
  - Shows exactly what formatting is applied to the selected text (or style).
  - Reveals extended information on special content like images, automatic numbers, etc.
• New Clipboard palette that shows available clipboards and their contents.
  - More easily switch between active clipboards. Double-click to edit the clipboard's text.
• Added an "Ignore Diacritics" option for Normal Find.
• Note styles now have options that enforce automatic before/after text around note references.
• Added: the menu Edit > Transform Text includes a variety of new commands that can:
  - Strip diacritics and strip combining marks.
  - Transliterate between scripts including: Katakana, Hiragana, Full-width and Half-width, etc.
  - Convert characters to their Unicode names and HTML entities.
• The autosave location can be set to any folder.
• Copy-paste for multi-part selections.
• Added the command Full Screen Minimal which switches to Draft View, Full Screen, and with all tools hidden.
• The clipboard tag can show either the active clipboard name or a preview of the clipboard's contents.
  - Double-clicking the clipboard tag's text will open the clipboard for editing
• The status bar can show word count, character count, and/or paragraph count.
  - The status bar can be shown or hidden via the View menu. This setting is saved in each document.
• The scroll location (not just the selection) is restored when reopening files.
• Added a command Convert Table to Text to convert all tables in the selection to regular (non-table) text.
• Added: can import .webarchive files saved by Safari.
• Enhanced existing palettes:
  - Character palette:
  ◦ Added more options (kerning, letter case, shadow color, underline colors, etc).
  ◦ Extended options are shown dynamically only if that formatting feature is used by selected text.
  - Styles palette:
  ◦ Added commands, separated by style type, eg: Select Next in Style.
  ◦ Can optionally show/hide each type of style, eg: hide character styles.
  ◦ New condensed mode that shows just the active style, instead of a list.
  - Table palettes:
  ◦ Resizing can be done numerically using the palette and menus.
  ◦ Table cell padding can be controlled on all sides independently (top, bottom, left, and right).
  - Stats palette:
  ◦ Can optionally exclude empty paragraphs from the count.
  ◦ Can optionally hide any particular item count, eg: hide number of paragraphs.
  - Paragraph palette streamlined its options, some of which are now (by default) only visible as needed.
  - Palettes that show mixed formatting now do so clearly using a customizable diagonal coloring.
  

Other Enhancements

• Any time a large amount of typesetting needs to occur, a progress bar should be shown in the document.
  - When reopening a document, only force typesetting for the visible text, instead of all text.
  - If a user cancels typesetting, the document should still be accessible, but scrolled to the very top.
  - When reopening documents after launch, the progress dialog should show overall progress.
• Better display of progress when creating a PDF or printout. User should be able to cancel at any point.
• Resizing an image should be proportional by default (keep aspect ratio), unless a modifier key is down.
• Added: images: the contextual menu for images should include a "Save Image" command.
• Added: menu commands to select the next/all text using the same language or font, eg: Select All in Font.
• Added: find: show brief overlay icon on screen when search wraps.
• Added: find: repeating a find next (or previous) limited to the selection should wrap through the original selection.
• Added: find: floating palettes should be able to manipulate formatting in the Find & Replace panel.
• New built-in commands to Add Line Breaks and Remove Line Breaks.
• Added: image and table cell padding can be controlled on all sides independently.
• Added: Postbox is now supported by commands on the menu File > Mail.
• Added: feedback: better default font/size in feedback window and user can zoom in/out.
• Added: holding down the Command key while clicking on some plain text that represents a hyperlink will open it.
• Added: the Help menu's search field now searches through the user guide.
• Changed: added menu for online user guide.
• Added: menu command "Edit Indents" added to the main menu and the ruler's contextual menu.
• Added: right-clicking a document ruler should show popup menus for ruler options (eg: ruler units).
• Changed: reverting a document to a prior version is a smoother experience, with less visual stutter and improved feedback as progress is made.
• Changed: improved contextual menu relevance and sorting.
• Added: tables: should have table specific commands on the contextual menus commands.
• Added: French contractions like l'ami and qu'avant should not be selected as a single word when double-clicking.
• Added: new separate QuickFix smart punctuation profile for French Canadian.
• Added: the menu Insert > Glossary allows the user to insert single glossary entry expansions, as well as more easily edit existing glossary files.
• If warnings occur when reading a file, the alert should include information on the type of problem.

Optimizations

• RTF files are opened faster.
• Text statistics and spellchecking update faster and more reliably.
• Optimizations and fixes for delays when working in long documents for the following tasks:
  - making a PDF or printout.
  - resizing images.
  - working on long documents with tables in Draft View.
  - editing certain kinds of documents with many dense footnotes.
• If the available system fonts change, prevent typesetting unless those fonts are actually used by text.
• Could take a very long time when copying a multipart selection with a large number of parts.
• Deleting text with a lot of note references is faster.
• Automatic info stamps that can update when a document is opened should do so, regardless of settings.
• Automatic content should try not to update on idle if a lot of layout invalidation would occur.
• Fixed: right-clicking to show the contextual menu for an empty selection should not have Apple copy the whole document's text for sharing services. This can be very slow.

Highlighted Fixes

• Prevent anti-virus software from incorrectly flagging Nisus Writer files as potentially dangerous (false positive) due to to use of use certain RTF controls (objdata).
• Fixed: save dialogs could be incorrectly cancelled if the user switches windows or apps.
• Sometimes changing the font family via the palette would incorrectly apply a bold or italic font face.
• The user's autosave delay should be respected after returning to work after a long idle period.
• Files imported from Microsoft Word with section breaks should remove any preceding newlines, since Word does not trigger a line/paragraph break for section breaks.
• Fixed: sometimes the wrong paragraph spacing is used when doing layout in Page View.
• Fixed: selecting .dot templates in an open dialog could sometimes incorrectly enable the "ignore rich text formatting" option.
• Fixed: the user should be able to drag in the gutter alongside a text area to select whole lines of text in that area.
• Fixed: file sizes reported by the Document Manager should match the Finder. Changed to using decimal units (1000) instead of binary units (1024). Also should include metadata like QuickLook previews and resource forks.
• Fixed: can drag-drop images from Photos into Nisus Writer documents.
• Fixed: switching between document views did not always keep the selection in view as intended.
• Fixed: if a document is already in Full Screen mode and then switches to Draft View, the user's customizations (eg: colors) should be obeyed.
• Fixed: tables: text inside tables should use the draft and full screen colors from the user's Appearance preferences.
• Fixed: copy-paste from PDF Expert should result in a PDF image, not a hyperlink to a temp file.
• Changed: if a lot of text is selected or there are many multi-part selections the formatting shown to the user in the palettes and other tools is limited for performance reasons. This limit is now based on processing time instead of a fixed arbitrary number of distinct sets of formatting. This improves the consistency of the presented information and generally results in more information.
• Updated PowerFind Pro / regular expression / regex engine / Oniguruma to version 6.7.1
  - Updated Unicode data to version 8.0.0
  - Added patterns like \N, \O, \p{In_Emoticons}, and \{Quotation_Mark}.
  - Fixes a variety of bugs, crashes, and memory leaks.
• Fixed: paragraph border spacing at the top of a page can incorrectly be reduced to zero.

Other Fixes

• Changed: styles: it is no longer possible to configure paragraph styles (eg: Heading 1) to override list style properties like the numbering format, before text, etc. From now on paragraph styles can only customize their list starting number and list indents. Other list changes must now always go through list styles.
• Changed: switched alls titles and labels to use the term "Formatting" instead of "Attributes", eg: Remove Formatting Except Styles.
• Changed: action commands that reference the "ruler" now consistently refer to paragraph formatting, eg: Copy Ruler is now Copy Paragraph Formatting.
• If the user chooses a document manager folder, and the existing autosave location is just the Crash Recovery folder, then set the autosave location to the document manager.
• Fixed situations where regular typing into a plain text file could incorrectly trigger the "discard formatting" warning alert.
• Fixed a variety of problems with autosaved drafts, most seriously that they could sometimes be incorrectly deleted from the autosave location. Less seriously that they could fail to reopen automatically at launch, trigger permissions errors, or not be marked as drafts.
• If any files to be reopened at launch are in the trash, the user should be asked about them all at once before the reopening process starts.
• Fixed: Go To Page did not work correctly if layout for that page had not yet been completed.
• Imported PDFs should default to showing page guides.
• An image's size could be incorrectly reported by palettes and menus if it was constrained to be smaller because the available space restricted it.
• Linked images did not automatically update if the image was edited externally but did not change its size.
• Replacing a linked image with a non-linked image would appear to succeed but the original linked image would incorrectly return if you reopened the file.
• Fixed: if two directly adjacent inline images are selected, resizing them was incorrectly non-functional.
• License key input is more lenient and ignores adjacent punctuation and bits of text.
• Scrollbars in full screen mode should use the user's chosen color scheme.
• Fixed: sorting paragraphs should ignore leading whitespace.
• Fixed several autoscrolling issues when editing text in Page View.
• Fixed: typing at the end of document in Page View, in a paragraph whose text straddles two pages with widow and orphan control enabled, could cause a lot of flickering.
• The Swap Paste command should be enabled if a table slice is selected.
• Inserting newlines and tabs into a style's preview produced incorrect results when a list style was in effect.
• Changed: removed "Select Range" formatting search commands, since they are superfluous and the behavior has been folded into the "Select Next" attribute commands.
• Changed: palettes: the Language palette's list of spelling corrections and thesaurus entries only requires a single click.
• Fixed: find: if a replace all operation generates new list items because newlines are inserted, the selected matches can be incorrect.
• Fixed: find: switching back to Nisus Writer from another Desktop with the Find panel showing should not bring the Find panel into the activate Desktop, it should properly reshow all document windows.
• Fixed: if the user opens and edits an attachment from Apple Mail, the save panel should default to the Desktop and use the original name, instead of showing the temporary folder and an untitled name.
• Changed: the folder names on the Open Recent menu (used to disambiguate files with exactly the same names) should not show temporary folder names that are strings of random letters and numbers.
• Fixed: the ruler should not allow or show certain markers when editing certain types of styles in Style View.
• Fixed: the "paste ruler" command can incorrectly introduce a writing direction override.
• Fixed: dragging the ruler marker for the hanging indent does not always update the locked indent marker position.
• Fixed: the command that converts characters to Unicode code points prefers the format \u{xxxx} now. When converting from Unicode the following escapes are now supported: \x{hhhh}, \u{hhhh}, &#xhhhh;, &#dddd;, U+hhhh, \xhhhh, \uhhhh.
• Fixed: the status bar coloring should match any user customizations in the active document view.
• Fixed: applying a color to some text could fail to change the display on screen when a global Document View color preference was in effect.
• Fixed: freshly pasted images should report their file name and type, eg: in the Formatting Examiner palette.
• Fixed: RTF files saved by Word can in rare circumstances open with some text using the wrong font.
• Changed: eliminated random elements of emitted RTF (eg: style order, list style ids) to increase consistency when text content hasn't changed.
• Fixed: reverting a plain text document after introducing formatting would trigger layout exceptions, where the user could not close the document.
• Fixed: text transformation commands (eg: convert to Unicode code points) could fail to process all text in the selection under certain circumstances.
• Fixed: tables: special selection coloring (eg: find results) should be obeyed for entire table slices.
• Fixed: spelling: red misspelling underlines did not always show reliably in ancillary text areas after switching document views.
• Fixed: spelling: red misspelling underlines should never be suppressed in text areas not being edited.
• Fixed: spelling: red underlines used to show misspelled words could appear at the incorrect vertical offset for certain kinds of content (eg: table cells) when paragraph spacing was not zero.
• Fixed: tooltips for special content (eg: footnotes, images, etc) are shown more reliably.
• Fixed: improved code that checks to see if the blank line at the end of a document requires a new page or not.
• Fixed: tables: sometimes beeps instead of pasting into table selection.
• Fixed: if the selection rests in a non-main text area, the Page Setup dialog can incorrectly ask about which sections to modify.
• Changed: images: the contextual menu for images should not include some irrelevant options like spelling, character transformations, etc.
• Fixed: the special characters palette and menu should be able to insert characters into sheets (eg: into the Set Custom Note Reference sheet).
• Fixed: if text entirely lacks a ruler, the automatic tab distance always incorrectly consumed the entire line.
• Fixed: inserting a word before an opening parenthesis character should insert a space.
• Fixed: redefining a style from the selection did not always properly consider font face overrides like Unbold.
• Fixed: styles: forward delete and backward delete keys should behave the same in Style Sheet view.
• Fixed: styles: the user should be able to copy-paste in the style preview text area.
• Fixed: changing view settings in Draft View will more reliably keep the same text visible.
• Fixed: deleting glossaries in the preferences was finicky.
• Fixed: palettes: if the language palette updates a thesaurus lookup after a delay, should not disrupt any scrolling the user has done in the thesaurus listing.
• Fixed: palettes: the user's choice of active font collection should be consistently respected.
• Fixed: fixed line spacing can use the wrong baseline if there is more superscripted or subscripted text on a line than regular text.
• Changed: improved placement and size of insertion point in superscripted text using fixed line height.
• Fixed: undoing a drag-drop of formatted text that resulted in QuickFix actions (eg: smart quotes) could result in unstable stylesheet state.
• Fixed: if the selection caret is set to a custom width and does not blink on/off, it can leave stale drawing on screen at the end of document.
• Changed: better resize cursors indicate actual directionality.
• Fixed: notes: documents with certain spanning footnotes could incorrectly hide note content out of view, or disassociate the note reference from the note content and place them on different pages.
• Changed: if a backup folder fails to be accessible, the warning alert should include an option to "Try Again".
• Fixed: images: drag-dropping an image between Nisus Writer documents should preserve image resizing and other such changes.
• Fixed: drag-dropping content into an otherwise empty document can trigger out-of-bounds index errors.
• Fixed: if an exception occurs during undo/redo, limit the problem to a single document and warn the user they should save and close the affected file.
• Fixed: images: drag-dropping image files with missing or incorrect file extensions should still insert the image, instead of creating a hyperlink to the file.
• Fixed: drag-dropping a word in front of a closing grouping character (like a close parenthesis) should not insert a space.
• Added: palettes: the table cell border and page border palettes should automatically select relevant visible edges based on the selection.
• Fixed: incorrect sentence boundary detection when a sentence ended with a number or abbreviation.
• Fixed: lists: applying a list style to a selection with mixed list styles is more consistent, following the behavior of other formatting commands to enforce a consistent list style.
• Improved the warning dialog that is displayed at launch when multiple copies of Nisus Writer are running at the same time.
• Changed: if a destabilizing layout error occurs the affected document window could fail to close.
• Changed: if a destabilizing layout error occurs in a document with unsaved changes the user should be forced to choose a new save location.
• Changed: loading the list of most recently used fonts should not check if they are still available on the system. This prevents annoying system alerts asking to maybe download fonts.
• Fixed: find: cutting text from the find field could sometimes incorrectly enable the formatting sensitive search option.
• Fixed: possible exception when resizing header/footer area.
• Added: doc manager: if the user chooses a new document manager folder that already contains existing files, the warning alert should include a button to create a new empty folder.
• Fixed: copy-paste of an image file from the Finder on High Sierra should not paste a large proxy icon, but should instead insert a link to the destination image file.
• Fixed: a new document window should not be created on app activation if the preferences window is open.
• Fixed: should not use template files that have been trashed externally.
• Fixed: ligature formatting of "use none" could be lost when copy-pasting or reopening files.
• Fixed: the Save menu commands for the Document Manager don't always default to the proper folder.
• Changed: tables: improved Fit to Contents table command when some title cells are empty.
• Changed: users should not be allowed to replace an open document's file using the Export As dialog.
• Fixed: images: sometimes tooltips for images incorrectly remain on screen, even after the user switches to another document.
• Fixed: notes: if there are a lot of footnotes that restart numbering on each page, background layout can continue indefinitely.
• Fixed: clearing all recent documents did not clear the contextual menu on the system app dock.
• Fixed: automatic hyphenation will incorrectly not be attempted if a line wrap occurs exactly at a punctuation character like a period or semicolon.
• Fixed: doc man: dragging a style from the style library preview area onto the same preview area should not trigger a style import.
• Changed: if an exception occurs while preparing the save panel, do not let it deadlock NSDocument's sync activity methods by bubbling up to Cocoa.Changed: styles: if the user renames a style so it matches an existing style, but differs only in character case or style type, the user should be warned. The user may still confirm and override to use the confusing name.
• Changed: styles: when pasting text from an external source, incoming style names should use case insensitive name matching if possible, eg: the document should not end up with both a "Hyperlink" and "hyperlink" styles (if there are no formatting conflicts).
• Fixed: empty text areas in Page View (due to section and page breaks) could trigger much more layout than required, leading to beachballs in long documents.
• Fixed: invalid nil "SYMBOL" field codes should not throw exceptions and prevent documents from opening.
• Changed: feedback completion message is clearer regarding replies for anonymous submissions.
• The active preferences pane should update its displayed settings after the window is closed and reopened.
• Added: the feedback reporter should warn about anonymous submissions.

Hangs & Crashes

• Fixed: possible crash when quitting the app.
• Changed: if an exception occurs while drawing text the user should be alerted instead of crashing.
• Fixed: making changes to images when Apple's image Markup overlay indicator was visible could crash.
• Fixed: adjusting section margins in Page View can trigger crashes.
• Fixed: possible crash when large layout invalidation removes a visible note area from the screen.
• Fixed: images: possible hang when ruler indents exceed the width of the image to which they're applied.
• Fixed: copy-pasting an attachment icon from Apple Mail should not cause a hang.
• Fixed: a very long QuickFix or Glossary abbreviation (1000's of characters) should not trigger a crash.
• Fixed: tables: trying to insert a table with gibberish text for the row/column count should not hang the app.
• Fixed: crash would occur if using QuickSave and an error occurred.
• Fixed: added safety so RTF writer doesn't trigger a hang, even if it can't make text emitting progress when saving.
• Fixed: potential crash after modifying styles.
• Fixed: possible crash when reverting a document to a prior version.