Up until now, we have focused on adding “basic” word processing features and a few of the features that were unique to Nisus Writer Classic. We have added them mostly in the order of popularity: the more commonly requested features get added first. In the coming year, our strategy for adding features is going to change somewhat. Now that we have most of the basics in place for our product, we are going to focus on targeting specific niches.
We are still in the process of making a final decisions about what those niches will be, but once we decide we will be sure to let everyone know. I can say that we consider Nisus Writer to be a product family of which Nisus Writer Express is the first member.
One of those niches has to be professional writers. On the other hand, if NW2 tries to cover to many niches, it is going to become like MS Word: doing a lot of things half way, becoming too big and slow.
To my mind, NW2 has the potential to be the only word processor a writer needs when working with OS X: from the notebook to NW2, and from NW2 to the printer.
I totally agree! As a professional writer, what features are most important to you?
I suspect a lot of the “standard” word processing things are already on your plate or have been mentioned in the forums, like being able to show the same document in multiple places (with separate windows on the same document and/or split points in windows). Something I see a lot — and agree with — is the notion that for professional writers, the more things can be done with the keyboard, the better.
There are a few relatively unusual commands I miss from a word processor I used to use for DOS. One that’s pretty useful would be a way to move the cursor and select text by sentence. It also had a transpose key which could be used with modifiers to tranpose words, sentences or paragraphs. Another one that’s more useful than it sounds is a way to leave non-printing “waypoints” in the text that you can navigate between with a next waypoint/previous waypoint command (or alternatively, or in addition to, use “bookmarks” you can set in the document and a dialog box that lets you jump between these bookmarks).
Something else I’d like to see is workspaces. When you save a workspace, it stores all the open documents, the window positions and sizes, and the insertion point location in each one. Then you can just restore the workspace to pick up where you left off. (The DOS word processor had a “default” workspace, so it was just a few keystrokes to save all the open documents, quit, and then later come back to where you were.)
Non-printing annotations would also potentially be useful.
For a more ambitious suggestion, a way to do revision tracking would be great. I’m pretty sure that’s considerably more complex than any of the other suggestions here, though. :)
What I’d really like to see on the way to making the program useful for professional writers is a solidifying and refinement of the current feature set, as well as a number of other features that most high-end word processors have.
I’m not a professional writer, but in my job I produce a lot of documents – short and long – and something that makes documents easy to create, edit and manage is very important to me. Off the top of my head, these are the features I really need:
1. The ability to define and save styles across the program so that I can call them up whenever I need them, and edit them with a minimum of hassles. Creating a large number of template files is not as efficient as having access to program-wide styles. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: WordPerfect for the Mac had the best implementation of saved styles of any word processor I’ve seen, although it fell short when it came to easily editing styles.
2. Robust and accurate hyphenation, so I can can concentrate on my writing, and don’t have to manually hyphenate after creating the document. This is very important for academic writing.
3. Split panes as mentioned above are helpful, as is the ability to tile documents.
4. Built-in paragraph indentation commands, as well as bulleted lists. It would be great to have options on how indents and bullets showed up. I realize this might mean dialogue boxes for these, but these are key features in my writing.
5. Tables that easily extend beyond page breaks for those of us who need to incorporate large tables or a large number of them.
6. Spell checking and word counting within tables.
7. Easy multiple-column support within the same document.
8. Fully user-defined keyboard commands.
9. An essential file menu similar to what existed in Nisus Classic.
I have so far created over 200 documents with Nisus Writer Express 2.x, ranging from one page to over sixty pages – so I think I have a pretty good familiarity with the program. Most of the suggestions I have do not require adding additional features but enhancing what exists. It’s been my experience that most programs really start to hit their stride round about version 3, and I see this happening with this program. My biggest request at this point is in making the writing process as smooth and easy as possible before adding such features as graphics layers or other ideas that you might have. There are a lot of good ideas here, and I’d like to see the current functions made even more functional, and doing what can be done to avoid unnecessary repetition with the program – and for me this happens the most when dealing with styles.
I don’t know if this is exactly the kind of feedback you’re looking for, but I hope this helps!
I’m going to apologize in advance for the length of this comment, but this blog thread deserves to be responded to. I’m a professional writer, and have been for many years. Currently, I’ve been writing a book, almost all of which has been composed using Mariner Write, a program I’ve been using (mostly happily) for a long, long time. During a conversation with a fellow novelist, she mentioned that she had been using NWE, and that I ought to take a look at Nisus’s web site. I did, and was immediately struck by what a terrific community you guys have built around your customers. The forum is a terrific tool for giving and receiving immediate feedback and for helping NWE users feel like they’re not alone in the world. By contrast, the only time I ever hear from Mariner is when they try to sell me something.
Since I appreciate your efforts at community building, I took a look at NWE 1.1.2 and immediately appreciated the look-and-feel aspects of the software, if not its lack of necessary features. Still, I wanted to give it (and you) a fair shot, so I began writing a chapter using NWE. I thought the chapter would be about 5 pages max, but it turned out to be over 70 (not unlike this comment).
I paid my money and waited — not entirely patiently — for 2.0 to come out. When it did, and I attempted to use it to edit my chapter, I was horrified to discover some of the most crippling bugs I’ve ever encountered in any software: blank pages, errant indents, overlapping printing, the inability to put auto page numbers in tables, glacial performance and, the clincher, the stripping of character formatting when styles are applied. Any one of these performance characteristics would have me shaking my head. But add them together and I’m shocked.
So, you want to know what I, as a professional writer, want most out of this program? I want you to unscramble the features you’ve already got before you solicit recruits for a fishing expedition to add even more new features.
Yes, I recognize that not everyone is experiencing the bugs that are biting me, but that’s little consolation when I open up my 70-page chapter and see what a mess it is.
I want you guys to succeed very much, and it’s only because I like your responsiveness in the forum that I’m even sticking with you this long. But you’ve got to fix this product to the degree that I can use it with confidence. As it stands, I’ve gone back to 1.1.2, even though it has a horrendous line-spacing bug. I don’t imagine all of your potential users are this forgiving. So my suggestion to you is to fix this product and fix it quickly. If it means spending less time writing blogs about how great everyone thinks the product is, I’m willing to suffer their absence while you devote your energy to satisfying your current generation of customers instead of your next one.
I discovered MW2 after a horror story with MS Word 2004 —it couldn’t even open documents created by previous versions—, so I really want NW2 to succeed and become THE word processor for OS X.
As a writer, I’d like to see the most nagging bugs ironed out of the current version: The redraw-screen routine when hyphenation is on; fix multi column behavior; separate paragraph and character formatting when applying styles.
When those bugs are fixed, even if it seems to repeat some posts above —or perhaps because of that— I’d like to see:
1. Speed, speed, speed; even if I open a 200 page document.
2. Cross document stylesheets. If the stylesheet is updated, when associated documents are loaded the styles are updated as well.
3. Bookmarks with a palette. This is extremely useful when editing long documents.
4. Notes.
5. The ability to insert document’s features in running headers of footers (file name, for example).
6. Hyphenation support in other languages.
All of the above, except bookmarks could be implemented without changing the look and feel, and without impacting the writer-centric design of NW2.
Graphics layer and Mark this place?
Many years ago in a Nisus version number unremembered by me, there was an incredible graphic layer.
I used Nisus then. I used those two tools, and I miss them.
I was a professional Stage manager and throughout the runs of several plays, I used Nisus, and those layers. It was very easy to get an entire script into Nisus, and then with the “Jump To Label,†during rehearsal, I could very easily, at the behest of the Director, jump to the label of any particular scene. I could then tell the actors which page to go to in their script books. That was a very useful tool.
The graphics tool allowed me to mark any place in the text with a marker, and I could then draw a line to the side of the page and include my cue warnings and special directions to myself about what to watch for on stage, in order to call the lighting and sound cues at the proper moment. …
I miss those tools.
Jack
I really miss Mail Merge. I still have to open Classic just to run a mail merge document once a quarter. :-(
Like Dennis, I want you to succeed with your elegant word processor. I also agree with him that you should get everything right before adding new features. Unfortunately, with NWE 2.0.1 you aren’t there yet for me.
I’m a different kind of professional writer: scientific. Just now I’m working on a typical manuscript with the standard tools in Word X: 14 pages or so, with super- and subscripts, Greek characters in Symbol font, three figures (pasted in from Kaleidagraph), one table (from Excel), equations in-text and displayed (from MathType) and references (from EndNote). I saved the manuscript as a 400-kB RTF file and tried to open it in NWE. It did not go past the first figure on page 5, the Greeks displayed as unchangeable dingbats, and EndNote failed to format the bibliography.
I’m using a demo and will buy a full license now that the new fiscal year has begun. Much as I’d like to switch to NWE for everything, I can’t do so yet but I’m hoping. Keep at it, guys.
Double underline, please.
The new feature that is most needed is a macro language, and I don’t mean Perl, which is inaccessible to all but geeks and people with a lot of time to challenge the steep learning curve. OS X comes with other scripting languages preinstalled, and still others can be installed (according to my reading). Express needs to provide access to scripting languages that mere mortals can use. Unless you can use Perl, Express for all practical purposes has no macro language at the present time.
HI everyone:
Thanks for all of your comments here! I am very interested to hear more about what you need as professional writers. As for scripting languages: we want to eventually allow you to use any scripting language you want.
However, we need to choose one “primary” language for the future that we will make sure will work with formatted text and so on. What would you think about using AppleScript for this?
I’m not a professional writer, but I wanted to add my two cents: I hope that one of your planned features is autocomplete — the kind that automatically detects “*” and begins a bulleted list, or detects a “1.” and begins an auto-numbered list. That’s the only thing I miss from Microsoft Word.
As a writer of scientific and technical documents, including lecture notes that generally run about 300 page per course, here are the key things I need:
** Robust graphics support — my class note have literally hundreds of graphics in them, including simple vector line drawings and 300 dpi rgb rasters. And, of course, every equation is a graphic. You should allow both inline (character) graphics as currently supported and fixed to page graphics around which text wraps. Don’t make these latter graphics “move with paragraph” as this always seems to creates more problems then it solves. The NWE files with graphics must be kept to a reasonable size, not balooning like they do at present. You might want to consider doing what KeyNote does where each document file is actually a package containing copies of the JPG, espf, pdf, etc. files for each graphic. That way you could perhaps maintain the rtf format of the text file. I do NOT need drawing tools. I just need NWE to be a container for graphics that I draw in other programs.
** Autonumbering — the implementation in NW classic was actually pretty good. I will echo the other comments here by saying, whatever else you do, please make sure that they don’t function like Word. Word has the most frustrating, brain dead autonumbering system I have ever experienced.
** Cross-referencing — must be flexible and permit the renaming of markers to be cross-referenced.
** Table of contents — generated from Headings styles, automatically updates when one moves or revises a heading.
** Indexing — useful but much less important that TOC.
** some sort of master document scheme allowing one to cross reference text in other files (e.g., other chapters or lectures). This would also allow one to build table of contents or indexes across multiple files.
** EndNote integration — This is what currently keeps me writing my professional papers in Word.
** MathType integration — double-click to launch in MT.
** Outlining — would be nice but distinctly secondary to the above.
I realize that what I am describing sounds a lot like NW classic (which I used faithfully for more than a decade) or even a FrameMaker “Lite”. In fact, the fact that Adobe has not ported FrameMaker to MacOS X would seem to be a potential opportunity for Nisus.
Please, please, please, add multiple character shortcuts and macroize-button in Find/Replace.
And it would be wonderful to have the NWC Define Styles Sheet and Define Numbers Sheet.
Keep on the good work.
The day will come, that I again will praise the lord for a Nisus TeXt Editor, Matze
“However, we need to choose one “primary†language for the future that we will make sure will work with formatted text and so on. What would you think about using AppleScript for this?”
I understand you are working under constraints. My feeling about AppleScript is that it is too arcane, like Perl. A Basic-like language (similar to the Classic NW macro language) would be something usable to the most people.
For me, Endnote (the programm) integration would be the most important feature.
For me, I need a better integration with Bookend. The macros provided by Sonny Software is good, but I would prefer a similar integration as between Bookend and Mellel.
The feature of being able to produce TOC and index would be great as well. Same with the capacity of floating graphics.
I miss the booklet-print feature of Classic – perhaps NWE2 has it, but I have not yet figured it out.
As for a default scripting language I would suggest Python. It is gentle to beginners and powerful enough to geeks.
Since Apple is coming with Automator in Tiger, AppleScript might get used through Automator and so Nisus should implement a thorough pre-built Action set for it instead of making AS the default macro language.
The coolest thing of course would be to allow the user to choose in the Preferences pane (or Macro menu) between Perl, Python or AppleScript as the scripting language for that user (or even allow him to access the scripting languages available in the user’s Mac OS X installation so he/she could choose to use Ruby, TCL or more esoteric scripting languages that one might have installed).
But as mentioned above: please fix things before adding new features.
Keep up the good work!
Re: scripting languages, I agree with the suggestion to use Python (or stay with Perl). It and Perl are more widely supported (across platforms) than Applescript, and are powerful enough to facilitate all sorts of things (e.g. citation and bibliographic formatting). Ruby is quite nice too, though not as widely supported. In any case, I think Apple-only solutions (unless demonstrably superior functionally) are a losing strategy personally.
Don’t give up on AppleScript. It’s still the only way to manipulate some thing. I’ve written a script to grab the selected address in a letter and create a new addressed envelope. I don’t think something like this is possible in either Perl or Python.
I’m a Nisus Writer “Classic” user of many years (over a decade!) who still uses it under “Classic” on MacOS X, though it has its problems :-( I skiiped NWX 1, it just didn’t cut it, sorry folks. I’ve just purchased NWX 2 because it is a lot better and want to make sure NWX 3 makes it. I haven’t used it extensively yet, but trying to read in my Nisus documents quickly shows what’s missing.
* Auto numbers – you need these for any technical document, and to go with them…
* Cross referencing.
* Overlapping user defined character styles. The styles in NWX are very good, better than NW, but they have this little quirk. Select some text and make it italic, then selecting an overlapping range and make it bold – the overlap is bold italic, what else! Try this with two user-defined styles and the second style wipes out the first in the overlap… Why? Again this is needed in many technical documents (one style might be a font selector for special text, another might be a highlighter)
* I’ll miss the booklets, as someone else also wrote. But there are Unix commands to do this with postscript… (maybe you could just call them…)
* And of course it doens’t read in NW Classic documents seamlessly – even when the needed features are in both.
I’m looking forward to this program maturing, and I’m sure it will be useful as it is! Unfortuantely for me Word will have to stay on my disc – unless NWX starts to understand Word and it’s change tracking, which I have to deal with professionally.
Sir, Is it possible to count the number of characters of equations, created by using Mathtype in Microsoft Word.
I hope very much you reinstate a feature that was in version 1: the scroll window of results under the find/replace box. I really hated to see that disappear.
I would love to have even more integration of Bookends with Nisus Express; I agree with a previous post that more than the Bookends macros would be great. Mellel (ahem, the writing program I used to use) has this integration and though yours would not have to be exactly like it, this would be a boon to those of us who gave up on Endnote as it got buggier and they decided to focus more on Windows users–there are a lot of us who jumped to Bookends and like it very much.
Two, I see such power in macros, but like many I just don’t see how I would want to learn a scripting language. Anything you could do to give us the power of such a language, but with an interface that anyone could employ—like what you now have with some of the Powerfind commands (dropdown menus I like a lot here).
Find/Replace with styles which, I believe, you are intending to implement in a future release?
Notes.
Autonumbers.
Cross-referencing.
These last three are so useful in academic writing.
Thank you for the opportunity to submit comments.
As a novelist, and Screenwriter, I have worked for years on MS-word and I’m so glad you’all came into life.
One thing I hope you continue to build on is your already excellent Thesaurus, I wish (Yeah its a dream) there was a user way of up dating it though. I use a lot of slang and it is an ever growing and changing form.
As a dyslexic writer I am truly fond of your spell checker, without all that useless grammar checking.
I do hope that it will continue to improve its ability to handle large documents. I still have had to drop into MS-Word to compile my finished chapters and get an accurate world count etc.
Keep up the fantastic work!
I’m a professional portuguese screenwriter, using either MS Word (and now NWE) and Final Draft.
Since you say NWE is just the first of a family of writing related products, a “Nisus Screenwriter” would be most welcome.
Regarding NWE, I would love if it was speedier with long documents.
I am hoping soon I can read my numerous classic Nisus files in the new Nisus.