Basic macro help

[Kaveh Bazargan]

I am an old time Nisus and Qued/M macro writer, but struggling with Express. Can someone give me some basic pointers please:

1.
==

What does a Nisus Menu command macro actually look like? I can't find an example anywhere. When I try to run a macro with just:

Bold

I expect the selected text to be emboldened but nothing happens.

2.
==

Here is a real example of what I want to do. I need to select all of text matching a regexp, and make all those selections Red. I can't work out how to do it with a menu command macro or with AppleScript.

Any guidance appreciated.

[GeoffRoynon]

You could try searching through the Nisus Listserver archives for the word "macro".
The URL is: http://listserv.dartmouth.edu/archives/nisus.html

Geoff

[Kaveh Bazargan]

My god. Why didn't I know about this list?

Found my answer and the answer to all future questions too!

Why is this not advertised on the Nisus site I wonder.

[gemboy27]

You could try searching through the Nisus Listserver archives for the word "macro".
The URL is: http://listserv.dartmouth.edu/archives/nisus.html

Geoff

personally I have little success in searching that list. Most of the macro discussion is NW 6.5 or converting 6.5 macros to NWE, so if you don't know how to do a macro, it isn't much help....

[Kaveh Bazargan]

Actually I made some progress since my first post. I searched only threads in 2005, so there was more relevance to Express.

[riccardo]

This all begs the question: Where's the documentation? If programmability is one of NWE's big selling points, then why doesn't Nisus publish some really good documentation? It's not logical, Captain.

(I'm not talking about a macro tip here and a macro example there. I'm talking a real top to bottom explanation of the language, syntax, how it all fits together in NWE, macro examples for each command/function/whatever. Just like with any other commercial program. This is too much like ... Linux!)

[dshan]

This all begs the question: Where's the documentation? If programmability is one of NWE's big selling points, then why doesn't Nisus publish some really good documentation? It's not logical, Captain.

(I'm not talking about a macro tip here and a macro example there. I'm talking a real top to bottom explanation of the language, syntax, how it all fits together in NWE, macro examples for each command/function/whatever. Just like with any other commercial program. This is too much like ... Linux!)

The documentation is in the NWX User Guide where it explains the scripting architecture, how Perl script headers work and what each of them does, then there's a bunch of pre-supplied Perl macros that come with NWX in ~/Library/Application Support/Nisus Writer/Macros that you can examine to see how they work and modify freely. The assumption is, of course, that you already know Perl (as one of the most widely used scripting languages in the world many people already do). As there's an ocean of documentation and courses on Perl available all over the web (the NWX User Guide gives you some URLs for this) you should have no problem finding whatever you need on Perl. It's like Linux in the sense that instead of reinventing the wheel for every app you leverage pre-existing, widely documented tools that do the job you need done and don't lock you in to a particular vendor. It's very logical.