nisus.com

Having demoed Nicus Writer Express I find it to be a wonderful mode of communication. I enjoy using Nicus over MS Word for Mac 2004 and find it more intuitive to my needs and less cluttered with stuff I cn't use. I want to buy a license, but I have one problem.

I'm a writer and currently working on deadline with my second book. My contract calls for me to submit my final manuscript in MS word.

What I would like to do is finish my book in Nicus Writer Express to aid my creative process, then cut and paste these documents into MS Word to fulfill my obligation to my publisher.

My question: Will I lose anything in the transition---such as paragraph formatting, italics, etc. ? If so, do you see another solution that will allow me to work in Nicus and deliver my book in Word?

Thanks in advance for your help. I'm ready to buy a license today if this can work out.

Nisus saves as rtf which is a nearly native MS Word format. RTF has been around since at least Word 1.5 on the Mac under OS 3.2. I would ask if they would accept rtf files.

Having said that if all you used was native formating of character formats (like bold and italic), they people on the dark side will have not trouble reading the file and have it appear as intended.

Mike

I suggest you simply try it. Create a couple paragraphs and/or sections using whatever formatting you envision your manuscript will contain. Export to Word and see what works.

Nisus Writer Express gives you the option of saving in Microsoft Word Format. This is really RTF with a .doc extension, but Word should open it up without any trouble, and the publisher shouldn't be able to tell the difference.

If you want to be absolutely sure the editor/publisher can open your document and see it as intended, it might be a good idea to open it in Word to see what it looks like. I wouldn't cut and paste from NWE to Word, though. Just save the file in RTF or Word format and open the file with MS Word. You might then want to save it with Word before sending it off.

All excellent tips. Thanks to each of you for some very intuititive advice.

I too have a contract specifying I should deliver my novels and such in Word. For a while I did “Save as Word” when I was finished, but then once I forgot and nothing bad happened: the text opened in Word for Mac at my publisher's and nothing was lost. In the meantime, I have checked it for myself. At work, I only have Windows and Word. My Nisus file opened as a Word file without me having to do anything. Everything was as I had determined it in Nisus, formatting and all.
To sum it up: it works.