nisus.com

I just put in an order for a new G5.
Why? Because I expect to be running Classic for a few more years.
Why? Because NW Classic still has many features NWE lacks, and does not appear to be getting any time soon.

- invisible text, so I can maintain files for both printing and web sites
- indexing and TOC styles, critical for textbooks
- (mail) merge so I can combine thirty chapters into one book
- the ability to compare documents so I can see what my publisher has done to the MS
- MUCH higher speed and greater reliability, though NWE is improving

There are lots more little things, but these are the five show stoppers preventing me from bagging Classic. At the present rate of progress making it back to the features of NWC, I'm guessing it'll take five to seven years for these things to return.

Oh, and it would be nice if NWE could read a NWC file and bring the graphics over so they don't have to be reinserted and .... well that's enough complaining for now.

Time to open up the publisher's file in NWE (it reads/writes better rtf) copy a few chapters at a time into NWC (not very many or the copy crashes), use the compare feature against original chapter files, then put the corrections into my master files. Why can't I do this and re-merge in NWE?

Rick

May I also add that the following important features are missing:
1. Text wrap: especially the ability to create a text box to wrap around a text.
2. 'Ruby' or 'okurigana': this feature was available in NS Classic.
3. Better handling of images.
4. Drop caps.
5. Water-marking.

Or perhaps the title should be, “most desired features of Nisus Classic.”

For me:

1. Markers and Jump-to. I like how this feature has been implemented, expanded upon, in Jedit X [http://www.artman21.net/product/JeditX/index_E.html] and CopyPaste (yes, that indispensable addition to the Mac Clipboard [www.scriptsoftware.com] also has quite a nice text editor included! )—instead of being accessible (only) by menu as in Nisus Classic, the markers can be viewed and used in a separate panel. In this way they can form a clickable go-to table of contents or outline, if you wish.

2. Catalog (of docs) and multi-doc search. This was great. You could save search lists, as in “all my files dealing with xyz”.
I suppose with Spotlight nobody cares about implementing this sort of thing any more but until Spotlight shows the search term in context, in a short excerpt from the document, it is not worth bothering with. I guess it is fine if you just want to find the one doc where you referred to antinomianism (but if you are the sort of person who refers to that sort of thing once, I am sure you will make a habit of it). Spotlight is for people searching for somebody’s address and that is about all as far as I can make out, being a non-Tiger user.
As I recall one could do other things in the Catalog such as create a new folder on your drive, and move and retitle docs without opening them.

3. Ask Joe Kissell to write a Nisus Express book. The Nisus Way was much more than a manual though Nisus’s manual is very good. My copy of The Nisus Way is well-worn and spiky with post-its.

It would be desirable to have a "Redo" or "Repeat last operation" (say, in the Edit menu) for things such as Table Insert Row/Column and Format Baseline Raise/Lower - typically one wants to repeat these operations - probably there are others as well that often need to be repeated.

It would be desirable to have a decimal point alignment option in Format Table.

I miss "insert chapter #" and "go to page ____" from Classic...I used them both constantly...I also liked the way Word (which I haven't used in about a hundred years) "remembered" the last last three insertion points, making it easy to quickly go back to previous locations....