Feature ideas -- sort of related to the big documents

[gemboy27]

feature ideas: insert file / merge doc

One of the things I can do in MS Word is to insert file. This is a great option because you can have your main doc (a book for example) and you can work on bits (chapters) and insert them as you go

or in other files you can merge, so you can produce an end product with all the parts....

an future for this idea

btw, just figured out 'complete' and YAH-Hoooooo

take care
George

[gemboy27]

I would LOVE to import styles from other documents!!!

[cchapin]

My previous (Windows-only) word processor had a master document/subdocument feature. You could set up a master file (say for a book) and it would contain links to each subdocument (say the book chapters). In the master document, you could then set up the general structure, styles, section breaks, page numbering, headers, footers, table of contents, index and so forth.. You could then open any or all of the subdocuments within the master document. You could also save and remove the subdocuments again, leaving only the subdocument links. This meant you could easily work on the book as a whole or only on one particular chapter at a time.

I won't say that this was always a trouble-free venture, but it was helpful for large projects. If Nisus Writer Express eventually has a capability along these lines, that will be great. The main difference I see between this and what you described is the ability to include or exclude subdocuments at will.

--Craig

[marc]

My previous (Windows-only) word processor had a master document/subdocument feature. You could set up a master file (say for a book) and it would contain links to each subdocument (say the book chapters).
...
I won't say that this was always a trouble-free venture, but it was helpful for large projects. If Nisus Writer Express eventually has a capability along these lines, that will be great. The main difference I see between this and what you described is the ability to include or exclude subdocuments at will.

I'd agree that this could be a very good way to approach (I've used it myself, in the past), and could be useful in team collaboration, making it easier to farm out sections of a document, and maintain consistency... this may also be an area for Rendezvous to come into play (re previous forum discussion of SubEthaEdit) -- not so much in collaborative editing of a single document, but in the areas around sharing subsets of a document, access from different machines etc. (e.g. network document manager.)

Rendezvous might also come into play if the DM had simple share control, a la iPhoto, wherein a subset of documents could be marked 'shared', and appear on the local sub-net, for other NWX users (probably as 'Read-only', sharing for editing probably points more to a server-based approach, with a 'check-in' concept.)

I would really like to see Nisus making the sharing, and standardisation of styles, dictionaries (inc. auto-complete/QuickFix) etc. easier, and Rendezvous, or a more 'formal' client-server approach might be the way to do it... in the simplest case, it would be good if I could point to these resources outside of the application, and my local machine... maybe they're just stored on a local server, that I and my colleagues can get to -- there'd need to be some editing control, but this could be a way to have departmental styles dynamically available (well, perhaps cached locally, and checked against the server version, to get updates.)

Another simple instance would be the basic ability to share these items by simply sending them to another user (e.g. OmniWeb workspaces)... after all, the objects in question are just files, and all you need is an easy mechanism to locate and load said files. That way I could set up NWX2 for my father's business, without the trip to Sydney (...but that's a bad idea... no, I really need the trip!)