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About -
NisusWriter 6.5
For the first time, the Jewish Community
can write in English plus Hebrew,
Russian, Persian, Yiddish... as many as
19 different languages in the same
document with the same word processor.
And Nisus Writer gives you this
capability because its the first word
processor thats completely Macintosh®
WorldScriptTM savvy. Nothing compares
for diverse language writing
flexibility, especially in right-to-left
text entry. Not to mention powerful
editing, formatting, graphics, and
layout features, including footnotes and
automatic cross-referencing. You can now
save any Nisus Writer file in HTML
format to easily create web pages. If
you are a rabbi, an educator, or a
community lay leader, or just need to
occasionally add Hebrew to your
wordprocessing documents, Nisus Writer
is for you.
Features - NisusWriter 6.5
Nisus Writer gives you the power to
write in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish,
all in the same document. Nisus 6.0 has
an abundance of features, including:
Tables Recorded sound annotation
Floating tool bars Equation Editor
QuickTime support Publish and Subscribe
Find materials used in one file to use
again in others. Nisus Writers
unparalleled Find/Replace capability
allows you to search in multiple, closed
sermon, bulletin article, eulogy and/or
story files for key words or phrases and
create a concordance of their
occurrences. When Nisus Writer finds
them you can copy them from one file and
paste into other documents. You can find
any Hebrew word in your document whether
it appears with or without vowels.
Nisus Writer 6.5 Updates
* PowerPC only
* Runs in Classic mode under Mac OSX
* Runs on any Macintosh running 8.5 or
later
* Added outlining (see the Outline
submenu of the Tools menu).
* Added the Document Manager (see the
Documents menu to the right of the
Gear/Cogwheel menu).
* Changed: moving paragraphs (selected
by "quadruple-clicking" 4-clicks) has
been changed. Copy and Paste now allow
you to copy a paragraph by pasting
either at the end of the paragraph in
front, or at the beginning of the
paragraph behind the new location. Drag
and Drop adds an additional return at
the end of the selection.
* Changed: the "Plain Text" command no
longer clears user defined styles. This
was changed so that choosing plain text
within an outline would not break the
outline.
* Fixed a crashing bug when quickly
typing more than 32 characters in the
Catalog window.
* Fixed support for importing and
exporting footnotes using the Mercury
RTF filter. The changed filter itself
(installed with this version) is also
required for footnotes to work.
Nisus Writer 6.0.1 Updates
* Nisus Writer 68K version is now
released.
* Navigation Services is now a
preference you can turn on (in the
Startup preferences).
* The TidBITS AutoCorrect glossary,
created by Adam Engst consisting of over
2700 words is now shipped in the
Glossaries folder of the Nisus Writer
Tools folder.
* A selection of Nisus New Files is now
available in the Stationery folder of
the Nisus Writer Tools folder (none of
them require the English (UK)
dictionary.
* The HTML documentation has been
compressed and optimized.
* A new Nisus Table Tool released which
updates the functioning of some menus.
Nisus Writer 6.0 Features
* Zoom feature opens a floating window
which shows an enlarged (or reduced)
version of the text at and near the
insertion point.
* Added an automatic Glossary Expansion
feature. When turned on, any
abbreviation you have defined will be
expanded automatically as you type. The
setting is saved in the preferences
file.
* Added a new feature called the Nisus
Text Analyzer Tool. It analyzes the text
of the current document and produces
phrase lists according to relevance
indexes. These can be a useful starting
point for indexing. Can also be used for
very quickly producing a word list of
your document. Also lists number of
words, number of unique words, and the
frequency of each word and phrase.
* Support for Navigation Services was
added, including Open dialog preview of
text documents, Nisus Writer Glossary
documents and Macro documents.
* Support for contextual menus was
added.
* A new Grammar Checker is included.
* IBM's dictation software "ViaVoice" is
supported.
* Importing of graphics files using
QuickTime has been added.
* A new XTND RTF Filter from Mercury
Software has been added.
* Feature added to allow you to copy the
displayed data in the Word Count dialog.
* A special file save called
Nisus¨TextPlus was added to the list in
the Save dialog. It saves the document
as a text file with all the notes
(endnotes or footnotes) converted to
text.
* Nisus Table tool now remembers font
setting of each empty cell.
* Platinum menu background. (This is not
yet support for Appearance Manager.)
* Options added to the spelling dialog
to allow you to turn off capitalization
and repeat words checking.
* Checkbox in Find/Replace window for
turning on/off search through
headers/footers and footnotes.
* Catalog Icon display has been added
for users of MacOS 8.5-9.0.4
* Save Settings button, in the Print
dialog, saves our custom Print setting
panel items (e.g. page numbers as
numbered in document).
* Feature to make Find/Replace more
friendly. If the Find/Replace checkbox
"In Selection" is on, but there is no
selection and the user initiates a
search/replace operation, the checkbox
is automatically turned off and the
operation carried out on the active
document. Previously forgetting that it
was on would cause "Expression Not
Found" messages and frustration.
* When search is run from a macro, searc
Reviews - NisusWriter 6.5
Charles Hadad (11/1/2000) wrote:
A Word Challenger with Some Classy
Tricks
Nisus' latest word processor gives Mac
users most of what they would get from
Microsoft's program plus some neat
features all its own
Microsoft Word is the most used piece of
software on the planet, but that doesn't
mean it's the most loved. In fact, many
users enjoy using Word about as much as
they do weeding a prickly bed of roses.
If you're a Mac enthusiast who finds
Word a thorn in your side, take heart.
There's an alternative program called
Nisus Writer. It offers 90% of Word's
features, but at $100, it sells for
about one-third the price of Microsoft's
word processor.
Nisus Writer, published by a small
company in Southern California, has just
released a long-awaited upgrade. Fans
may be disappointed by the lack of new
features, but Nisus Writer 6.0 is
nevertheless powerful and easy to use.
In fact, on the Mac platform, it's the
last serious challenger to Word. And
while Microsoft feigns ignorance about
Nisus, it seems to be impressed enough
by Writer to have added many of its best
features to the last two versions of
Word for the Mac. These include
unlimited undos, multiple clipboards, a
thesaurus and dictionary, and the
ability to link one document to another.
Nisus has long been an innovator: Its
word processor was the first, for
example, to let you write in several
languages within the same document. But
Writer does have some glaring
weaknesses. Nisus' small staff has
struggled -- and failed -- to improve
the way the program handles tables and
multiple columns. Nisus doesn't include
an outlining feature, nor does it let
you create live links to Web sites from
within documents. Word does all of these
things well.
That said, Nisus Writer is an
outstanding program. It's simple to
learn and use, and you can easily
customize it with your own features.
Also, the program is fast and stable,
which can't be said of Word. One of the
biggest knocks against the Microsoft
program is that it's crash-prone and
sluggish, especially with large
documents. I can personally testify that
both charges are painfully true.
TALKING BACK. Despite Microsoft's
imitation of some of Writer's features,
Nisus still has a few tricks all its
own. One is the ability to read back
what you've written, which is great for
proofreading. Microsoft included a
text-to-speech feature in Word 98, but
it didn't work well. The feature was
yanked in Word 2001 (part of Office
2001, available for the Mac only). Nisus
also lets you save as many as 10
different items at the same time on
separate clipboards. You can edit any
clipboard -- adding new text or changing
fonts and color -- and then paste the
contents of each separately. Microsoft
added a multiple clipboard feature to
Word 2001, but its version is crude
compared with that of Nisus.
There's one trick Microsoft hasn't even
attempted. Nisus lets you simultaneously
select and edit words or sentences that
aren't adjacent to one another. For
example, you could copy the first and
last sentence of a document at the same
time and then paste them together in one
paragraph in a new document.
Such great innovations, however, seem to
be a thing of the past. In the latest
version, Nisus has added only a handful
of new features -- such as contextual
menus, the automatic expansion of
glossary abbreviations, and a grammar
checker -- and many of them are about
playing catch-up with Word. Sadly, the
grammar checker doesn't work any better
than Word's. What does work well, thank
goodness, is an enhanced ability to
create files that Word can read, and
vice versa. Without such a feature,
Nisus would be useless in a
Word-dominated world.
Despite all of Nisus' word processing
firepower, many longtime users are
unhappy with version 6. The disgruntled
are roughly divided into two camps --
those who wanted a good tool to create
tables within a document and those who
were hoping for a built-in outliner.
Nisus won't say whether these features
will be added in future versions. But it
does say that Nisus will be rewritten to
work with Apple's jazzy new operating
system, OS X, and it promises that the
rewrite will include lots of new,
high-powered features.
So is Nisus for you? I'd say yes if you
write lots of long documents, such as
books, reports, and theses. And no word
processor is better at handling multiple
languages within a document. |
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