Is Nisus Moribund?

[mountainman]

Is development really proceeding? So far all we've seen is a (much welcomed) maintenance upgrade, but we still have no clue as to the future of Nisus products, and Martin seems to be pretty busy. Sooner or later (the sooner the better) we need to know what's in the pipeline, if anything.

[betalogue]

Undoubtedly, it would be helpful if Nisus could be more forthcoming about the current situation. While the latest release was mostly a “maintenance” release indeed, it did include a new feature that I requested a while ago and that I am quite happy about (ability to switch back to older window style with separate title bar/toolbar). I take this as an encouraging sign.

[THDW]

My problem with the text to speech is pretty major. I cannot get Nisus to read aloud from the insertion point; Nisus goes back to the start of the document. I am surprised that I am not getting feedback from Nisus. I have posted here and I have written directly to Nisus support. Very frustrating. As a creative writer I find hearing my prose read back to me very useful. I am using the most recent Nisus and Sequoia.

T
Norwich

[phspaelti]

My problem with the text to speech is pretty major. I cannot get Nisus to read aloud from the insertion point; Nisus goes back to the start of the document.

Nisus does start text to speech from the beginning of the document and not from the insertion point. But I can get it to start anywhere in the document if I use a selection.

So here's a macro that will start speaking from the insertion point:

Start Speaking from Insertion Point.nwm

(5.6 KiB) Downloaded 170 times

[dharmanaut]

Is development really proceeding? So far all we've seen is a (much welcomed) maintenance upgrade, but we still have no clue as to the future of Nisus products, and Martin seems to be pretty busy. Sooner or later (the sooner the better) we need to know what's in the pipeline, if anything.

While I've been pleased with my quite limited use of Nisus Writer Pro (~1 year), I have been wondering precisely the same things: 1) Is the app simply so good that not much development is necessary, OR 2) is development moribund? With all the AI integration stuff screaming down the bobsled run, we need to know roughly what the company has in mind, or at least I'd like to better understand its approach/philosophy regarding such newfangled things. When the last blog post was a year ago, well, that's not particularly promising.

[betalogue]

I think it's pretty clear that NWP is not an app that is likely to readily jump on the latest tech bandwagon. NWP's feature set is pretty timeless and I wouldn't expect to see any AI features in it any time soon. As long as the developer(s?) continue fine-tuning the app, fixing bugs, maintaining compatibility with the latest OS and hardware, and adding the occasional new feature when appropriate, I am happy. If you need a quick AI fix, you might want to look elsewhere indeed.

[Amontillado]

Most of NWP is just what it needs to be. It would be nice to have page styles, though, so preparing a document for different audiences could include flipping header and footer styles, margins, etc.

[xiamenese]

Most of NWP is just what it needs to be. It would be nice to have page styles, though, so preparing a document for different audiences could include flipping header and footer styles, margins, etc.

I agree. There's not much that I feel is missing in NWP, but if page styles could be incorporated into the "Style collection" system, that would be a great enhancement in my view. Clearly .dot templates can be set up with those differences to cater for different target audiences, but as my workflow is to apply a style collection to a pre-written document using a macro, having page styles included would be a boon.


Mark

[THDW]

Philip

"Nisus does start text to speech from the beginning of the document and not from the insertion point. But I can get it to start anywhere in the document if I use a selection."

Thanks!
In the past I did a selection but lately I got into the habit of just asking the speech to start at the insertion point and it did. Or is my mind going? Perhaps Nisus was reading from text which I had selected earlier

I am now finding I can't get Nisus to count the words in a selection. Instead, it is giving me the total number of words in the document. Am I doing something wrong?

T

[adrian]

Dear Phspaelti

I too have written some macros in Nisus, which was fun, despite its rather unyieldy macro language.

There are still unaddressed questions in Nisus Pro, especially when it comes to copiously many footnotes (as an example in what should become a scholarly book or a PhD thesis), headers and footers in different sections, or formatting in various languages and alphabets (which continues to be pretty unstable, especially in tables); tables stretching beyond (soft) page borders results in formatting problems too.

Despite any eventual room for improvement, we have to get hold of Martin as a matter of utmost urgency first, to see what is the future of Nisus (including its demise or sale).
How do you think we can go about it?

All the best,
Adrian

My problem with the text to speech is pretty major. I cannot get Nisus to read aloud from the insertion point; Nisus goes back to the start of the document.

Nisus does start text to speech from the beginning of the document and not from the insertion point. But I can get it to start anywhere in the document if I use a selection.

So here's a macro that will start speaking from the insertion point:
Start Speaking from Insertion Point.nwm

[Þorvarður]

Hi Adrian,

There are still unaddressed questions in Nisus Pro, especially when it comes to copiously many footnotes (as an example in what should become a scholarly book or a PhD thesis)

Just curious, what problems are you having with footnotes in Nisus Writer Pro? And how many footnotes are we talking about?

formatting in various languages and alphabets (which continues to be pretty unstable, especially in tables)

Could you describe that in more detail? When you say 'unstable', does that mean Nisus crashes? And what languages and alphabets are involved?