Importing Microsoft Word documents

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sarvadi
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Joined: 2008-03-29 14:42:00

Importing Microsoft Word documents

Post by sarvadi »

Hello,

I bought Nisus because I loved its simplicity and I had every intention of using it as my primary Word Processor. I stopped using it when I realized that every time I opened a Word document I had to spend time re-formatting the entire document. By this I mean, having to resize graphics and re-formatting pages so that they would fall where they needed to fall.

I opene the same documents with Word and even OpenOffice and the documents opened fully formatted with graphics showing properly.

I am wondering if I am missing something here. I work with large documents that are done with Word (unfortunately), so it would be lovely if I could use Nisus to work with these. Any suggestions?

Jenise
dshan
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Post by dshan »

When the in-built Nisus Word conversion is not sufficient use another converter (e.g. Word, Open Office, Pages, etc.) to convert the Word docs to rtf format and open the rtf document in Nisus.

In fact you don't need to use another word processor, Mac OS X 10.4 & 10.5 have the command line textutil utility that can do such conversions for you ("man textutil" in Terminal for details of how textutil works).
sarvadi
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Post by sarvadi »

dshan wrote:When the in-built Nisus Word conversion is not sufficient use another converter (e.g. Word, Open Office, Pages, etc.) to convert the Word docs to rtf format and open the rtf document in Nisus.

In fact you don't need to use another word processor, Mac OS X 10.4 & 10.5 have the command line textutil utility that can do such conversions for you ("man textutil" in Terminal for details of how textutil works).
Why would I want to open a document twice? If Word or Open Office does the job, why would I want to Save As and then open again with Nisus. IT seems to me this is double the work. :(
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Elbrecht
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Post by Elbrecht »

Well -

the point is to Open "file.doc" to Save As "file.rtf" - i.e. to change from DOC to RTF. Or still better stick to RTF instead of DOC as standard - and/or let others pass you Saved As RTFs only for best performance with Nisus Writer.

HE
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sarvadi
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Post by sarvadi »

Elbrecht wrote:Well -

the point is to Open "file.doc" to Save As "file.rtf" - i.e. to change from DOC to RTF. Or still better stick to RTF instead of DOC as standard - and/or let others pass you Saved As RTFs only for best performance with Nisus Writer.

HE
Hi He,

I just tried this with my last big .doc - in other words, I opened it in OpenOffice and saved it in rtf. Once I did this it lost some of its formatting. I would now have to move lines about and center graphics and so forth. Double the work. Oh well.
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Elbrecht
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Post by Elbrecht »

Best thing to do, would be to Save As RTF in the very first place, i.e. in Word. All in-between-converting is auxilliary only. So get the original file, but saved as RTF - for best performance with Nisus Writer.

For strict one-to-one compatibility you have to stick to Word - that's what DOC is all about. That's just the Bill to pay...

Getting new Word format ISO-approved won't change anything - anyway...

HE
MacBook Pro i5
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Anne Cuneo
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Post by Anne Cuneo »

I don't know whether I am missing something here, but I do this all the time: I take huge documents from home to the office (in case there is a lull and I can work with them), and if I'm lucky and have had free time to work on them I take them back home. At home, I don't have Word on my computer, only Nisus and Open Office (which I seldom use). In the newsroom, we ONLY have Word, useless to say - and I'll never have enough epithets to say how much of a pain it is compared to Nisus.
Anyway, I do the to and fro “conveying” of the text through mails sent from and to gmail.
The only formatting that changes sometimes slightly is Pagination. Otherwise no modification.
Anne
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xiamenese
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Post by xiamenese »

Anne Cuneo wrote:I don't know whether I am missing something here, but I do this all the time: I take huge documents from home to the office (in case there is a lull and I can work with them), and if I'm lucky and have had free time to work on them I take them back home. At home, I don't have Word on my computer, only Nisus and Open Office (which I seldom use). In the newsroom, we ONLY have Word, useless to say - and I'll never have enough epithets to say how much of a pain it is compared to Nisus.
Anyway, I do the to and fro “conveying” of the text through mails sent from and to gmail.
The only formatting that changes sometimes slightly is Pagination. Otherwise no modification.
I suspect what you're missing is the graphics! I'm opening .docs all the time too ... .docs produced under the Chinese version of Word. In the past, tables got rather messed up, and I know I've had problems with graphics, but then Word doesn't use a standard graphic format, or so I understand.

Mark
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martin
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Post by martin »

Our ".doc" importer doesn't handle floating graphics (inline graphics are okay) so that can be a problem.

Whenever it's convenient, or very important, the best fidelity will be achieved when saving files as RTF.
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CrisB
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Importing Microsoft Word documents

Post by CrisB »

I import lots of MS-Word .docs from other people which all seem to be written in Windows. And I also have MS-Office so I can see how they originally looked.
Yet every such .doc with a graphic imported in NWP seems to need re-formatting. Only if there's no graphic do they seem to be more or less fine.
Nisus are aware of this problem, I have sent them at least a dozen - if not many more - such documents in the past.
And yes, it would be cool if Nisus Writer Pro could correctly display pages with graphics so that they looked the same as in MS-Word. This means graphics and headers/footers the same size, all lines the same spacing, and the document fits onto the same number of pages. For most people replacing MS-Word by Nisus, having a document appear identical when printed is critical.

Presumably, already implemented Nisus features like this were originally determined to be of higher priority than yet-to-be-produced features. Yet how can time have diminished the priority of MS-Word compatibility?
A consistent approach would give high priority to getting this long outstanding problem solved. This suggests that fixing and releasing bugs - such as this one - in the current version should be given higher priority - ie effort and resources - than adding new features. And so would continuing to improve the already outstanding ease of use.
Yet is priority being given to lower priority features for the next release, although existing features - such as this one - continue not to work properly?
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