nisus.com

The more I use Nisus Writer, the more I appreciate what a fantastic tool it is. I write for a living, but mainly small pieces, so I focus on basic functions rather than things like footnotes and bulleted lists. I like Writer's live word count, for example, and the way it's not thrown by ellipses. The elegant implementation of styles is also a delight after the nightmare that is Microsoft Word.
But there are two things I like in Word that I miss in Writer.
1) As far as I can see, there's no way to apply a style to text and have it override existing formatting like font size, bold etc - apart from Format -> Style -> Use Style Formatting Only. In Word, you can just alt+click on the style name and the style takes over. Or perhaps I'm thinking of Quark Xpress. Either way, it's a useful shortcut.
2) There's no way of pasting text from another document/ program without carrying over its attributes - font size, bolding etc - unless you do Macro -> Paste Text Only. Word has a Paste Special . . . option, just under the Paste command in the Edit menu. This seems like a more logical place to find the option. Perhaps you could have Paste Text Only in the Edit menu?
Any chance of a tweak in the next version?

(1) The issue of whether and when styles should override formatting was a topic of much discussion on this forum earlier. It seems there are various opinions about this. Originally styles did override formatting, but people complained and Nisus changed this behavior.

(2) There is a simple way to paste plain text from other applications. Just click Edit > Paste > Plain Text Only. I use this so often that I have attached a Menu Key to it (option-shift-command-V).

--Craig

Craig, thanks so much for the tip about Paste -> Paste Text Only. I can't believe I didn't notice this before - and I'm now feeling rather stupid.