nisus.com

I am presently finishing a book of short stories which will be published from the manuscript formatted using Nisus Pro. Everything has been working well to this point. Editing is coming to a close, and I recently started applying the font and justifying the text with hyphenation turned on. Suddenly the text has become a big mess: it's unstable and I cannot tell if the lines will be hyphenated the same way from moment to moment--constantly shifting. In one instance, the justified line will be hyphenated perfectly, but upon re-reading (after saving), the line will be broken and hyphenated differently, with hyphens added to words mid-line also. Additionally, there sometimes will be three hyphens splitting a word. Very frustrating--particularly to some as picky as I am. Should I hyphenate manually and turn off hyphenation? Should I kern each line manually also, or turn off kerning? What produces the best formatted text? I don't mind the work, but I do mind a shabby, unprofessional looking and formatted manuscript.
Perhaps Nisus Pro is not up to the rigors of a finely formatting manuscript, and I should format the manuscript using a different program.
Any ideas?

Thank you for any help offered

What version of OSX are you using? NWP relies completely on the system (OSX) when it comes to hyphenation, and if I recall correctly Tiger (10.4) had hyphenation bugs like you describe. I believe Apple remedied the multi-hyphen bug for Leopard (10.5), but I couldn't say if the actual hyphenation choices are any better.

Too bad, Martin! Yes, I use Mac OSX and it is an old version -- 10.3.9.
I have solved the problem by turning on hyphenation, then putting in hard hyphens, then turning off hyphenation. No extra hyphens. Pretty good justification. Sometimes I tighten up the kerning. I think it will look pretty good for a self-published book. Yes, it is time consuming, but I want it to look good.
Thanks.

It is too bad, but I'm glad you found a solution that does the trick for you. I hope your work goes well.

It should also be noted that NWP is supported only on Mac OS X 10.4 and above. Using 10.3.9 you're lucky it even runs.

Does nobody ever read the system requirements information that comes with software like Nisus?

Very true dshan- we often get customer emails asking why NWP won't launch on their old systems. But we should probably cut thoth some slack, perhaps he's using an older version of NWP.