nisus.com

Deadline looming, I had to saddle up and get writing on a project. Thought to give Pages a try. It's been spectacular. The software has really matured since I used it last—probably over a decade ago.

It took a few minutes to get used to the paragraph style methodology, but once I did, it became second nature.

It helped to reverse the way my function keys work to easily change paragraph styles. They act as normal function keys now. To access they're utility like brightness and volume etc, I have to press the fn-globe key at the same time. It was an easy behavioral change.

For a stress test, I dropped Moby Dick into Pages and it didn't slow the software down at all.

Food for thought for those moving from Nisus.

Pages is extremely pleasant to use. The page layout mode, sort of a lightweight desktop publishing mode, gives it wider uses than a traditional word processor would have.

My hot button is styles. Nisus is great in that department. Pages won't let you swap style sets in a document. I like to be able to morph a document into different looks, for instance when submitting something to multiple audiences each with different format requirements.

That's not easily done with Pages. Export to ePub is very good in Pages. The price is unbeatable, too.

If Pages were the only word processor on the planet I'd gripe about styles but I wouldn't be without a way to communicate.

I've finished a self help book covering Mellel, but it's not quite ready for prime time. The rewrite is taking me forever. My 8-5 job, which is often 8 AM to 5 AM, is slowing me down.

I'll post a link when I'm finished. It will go on Amazon Kindle, but for any who notice it here I would like to share.

I'm with Amontillado, styles is the pinch point for me. To me Nisus got it absolutely right in letting you apply a style collection to a pre-existing document, rather than having to shoehorn the document into a different template. The icing on the cake is being able to automate that and other things through the macro language.

If NWP does become unusable, I'll probably transition to Mellel for if/when I need a word processor. Otherwise, for writing I'm moving towards Markdown and Typst.

Mark

Yes –

I will go TYPST & OBSIDIAN then – but right now NWP still works fine for me on Sequoia 15.7.4

HE

Pages forces the use to choose between foot- and endnotes. Can't have both. Shame.

Despite my brave "Goodbye Nisus, it was nice knowing you" message from late last year, I still haven't made the move to a new word processor.

I said I was leaning to Pages, but I've just realised that the Apple program still doesn't provide an easy way to create an index.
So I guess it's going to be Microsoft Word.

A pity: the styles pane for Pages isn't bad at all.