nisus.com

The style sheet interface in Nisus Writer Express (NWE) is an interesting interpretation -- literally a "sheet" or page showing all the styles. However, in practice I find it slow and clumsy. It does not work well for quickly editing a style definition. One has to change out of normal editing mode into the special style sheet mode. Then one has to find the style in question. Often this means scrolling down through a long list (the list is vertically long because each style entry takes up a lot of vertical space). Then one has to select the style and make changes via the formatting controls, then switch context back to editing mode to really see the changes in context.

The best style interface I've ever used was in Pagemaker. Editing a style was just command-click on the style palette -- and the selected line in the style palette was usually the style of the current text paragraph -- so everything was in context. Changing the style's definition happened in a dialog box -- the underlying document context was not lost. Adobe InDesign is similar and offers in addition a "Preview" checkbox which lets you interactively see the effect of style changes on the underlying document.

Even venerable Word 5.1 had a quicker style editing interface.

Please consider a re-think of the style editing interface in NWE.

Thanks for a good product which will hopefully mature into an excellent product.

Please have a look at the new NWE 2.5 sneak peek alpha version. The new way Nisus handles the stylesheets are much better than in earlier versions.

I agree entirely with Paul – we seem to have very much the same setup, after all , and maybe do very similar work.

At the same time, having just downloaded the sneak peek of NWE 2.5, I also agree with Peter in that the new way of handling Styles is definitely an improvement. And so far the alpha seems quite stable and nice …

What remains troublesome, however, is the fact that the Styles are still handled in a different view of the document itself, and not in a separate dialogue box – or maybe somehow linked to the Toolbox. But I have to admit that it's nice that you can see a sample of your Style directly, and in this way NWE is one up on Word 5.1 and PageMaker – but not InDesign, as Paul points out.

And talking of Word 5.1, a reiteration of a previous request: a modest little filter that makes it possible to read Word 5.1 files directly, without having to resave them as .rtf. It only needs to work once with every file and then I can scrap Word. Please …

Peder