We have been working pretty hard since Macworld on the next release of Nisus Writer Pro: 1.1. This new version, which is free to current license holders of Pro, will offer several new features.
A highly requested feature for Pro is comments. Comments that are compatible with Word. We have accomplished that, and have included a few nice touches as well.
We have added a comment history, which is a really nice way of grouping together related comments. This feature makes it easier to read all of the comments, as they do not clutter up your document.
You can also collapse and expand comments, if you are into that kind of thing.
Lastly, comments are also customizable.
We have also added Mail Merge, another highly requested feature. Mail Merge is pretty straightforward, with one twist: You can add custom bits of perl code as a placeholder. This addition adds flexibility and makes it very customizable. You can also preview the final output.
There are other features, such as Go to Page, and the addition of a Large Caret option. A number of new additions to the macro language have been made. And many bugs are being squashed.
The system requirements have changed a bit. You now need at least Mac OS X 10.4, as Panther (Mac OS X 10.3.9) is no longer supported.
We hope to release this update before the end of the second quarter of this year. I hesitate to say that, however, as unforeseen things happen. Let’s just say that is what we are aiming for.
(Edited 11 April 2008 for clarity)
Nice ! Handling comments is indeed a requirement in some kinds of work.
With this addition, it looks like NWP is the first non-Word mac text processor that can handle comments, bibliography tools and line numbering…
No beta program ? ;-)
This looks really nice, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a beta version, let alone the final product. One question, though: is Mail Merge only compatible with Address Book fields, or does it support external sources, such as CSV or tab-delimited text files?
Thanks!
This does indeed look good and will go along way to making NWP a genuine alternative to MS Word. (Still need to see Revision Tracking that is compatible with Word though.) This means tat both Pages and NWP will have an implementation of comments that is superior to Word’s. :-)
mrennie: Mail Merge is compatible with Address Book and CSV files.
Vincent Noel: There will be a Preview version. When that happens, I will announce it here.