From: ace@tidbits.halcyon.com (Adam C. Engst)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.digest
Subject: TidBITS#118/Nisus_Details
Date: 8 Apr 92 05:52:41 GMT
Article-I.D.: tidbits.D2150083.apwbyr
Reply-To: ace@tidbits.halcyon.com (Adam C. Engst)
Organization: TidBITS

TidBITS#118/Nisus_Details
=========================
 
 The 3rd part of our three-part review of Nisus.
 
 Copyright 1990-1992 Adam & Tonya Engst. Non-profit, non-commercial
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 ace@tidbits.halcyon.com -- CIS: 72511,306 -- AOL: Adam Engst
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 --------------------------------------------------------------
 
Topics:
    More Bells
    A Miscellany of Nits
    Nisus Conclusions
    Nisus Details
 
[Archived as /info-mac/digest/tb/tidbits-118.hqx; 29K]
 
 
More Bells
----------
  If you want just one or two side-by-side paragraphs, or a short
  stretch of material in a different columnization from your
  document, you can have it, provided it does not involve run-over
  to a second page: the Paragon people have gone to the elaborate
  trouble of building a Place Page facility into the program. This
  means that you can attach to a page an image of another document.
  Double-clicking this image opens the other document itself for
  editing, and any changes made to the other document are reflected
  in your image of it. The image can be placed as a graphic, which
  means you can put it virtually anywhere on the page (with no
  deterioration in font quality). You can even play graphic tricks
  with it: have it appear upside down or sideways, and so on (though
  these do cause deterioration of font quality, at least on my
  StyleWriter). This is no substitute for real side-by-side
  paragraphs, or real change of columnization, and in my view it
  uses a bazooka to kill a gnat - if something this powerful and
  elaborate could be built in, why not just plain ordinary table-
  making? - but for what it does, it works beautifully, is easy to
  use, and has no noticeable disadvantages. (It's true that every
  Placed paragraph represents a file on disk of at least 3 or 4K,
  and that if you move that file you lose your link to it, but I
  don't regard this as much of a price to pay.)
 
  Nisus comes with a black-and-white graphic drawing facility, so
  you can make rudimentary PICT structures from within Nisus, or
  import and edit them; you can import bit-mapped graphics, of
  course, but they will remain uneditable bitmaps. A graphic is
  considered to live on the "graphics sheet" or the "text sheet." A
  graphic in the text sheet functions as a character in the stream
  of characters (this is good for fancy initial majuscules, for
  example), while a graphic in the graphics sheet is an independent
  entity: text can be made to flow around it or just cross right
  over top of it, and the graphic can be associated with a
  particular location on a particular page, or with a particular
  return-character. As most users probably own a more powerful
  graphics program (for example, in Nisus rotation must be through a
  multiple of 90), the graphics facility may not prove much of an
  attraction; the versatile interaction between graphics and text
  may prove valuable to some users, though, and Nisus does just fine
  for the occasional box or for creating graphical text blocks and
  dragging them around on the page for rudimentary layout.
 
  Adam adds that although Word 5.0 added a graphics module it has
  some bugs, and in true Microsoft style, it is a separate window,
  which makes it just about useless for creating graphics while
  visually interacting with the text. You can't move Word graphics
  around on the page without using the Frame command and going into
  Print Preview or a dialog box. So Nisus's graphics may not be
  Canvas, but they're decent and well-implemented.
 
  Cross-referencing is provided. If you attach a marker to text, you
  can then cause a number to appear elsewhere in your document which
  is the page number, line number, paragraph number, or actual
  content of the marked text. This number is updated automatically.
  However, there is no way to make visible the fact that text is
  marked, so you can easily delete or in some other way munge your
  marker without knowing it. You cannot find out the name of the
  marker that a cross-reference references; hence you cannot jump to
  the referenced text. Even worse, your marker and your cross
  reference to it have to be in the same document, but since Nisus
  provides no facilities for dividing your document into sections,
  you won't be able to maintain cross-referencing over a long
  document if it is to have any sections. For example, if you're
  writing a book, then if you have a section (such as a Preface)
  that involves a different style of page-numbering from the rest of
  the document (say, it uses Roman numerals), then you won't be able
  to include it as part of the whole book, because a Nisus document,
  having no sections, can only involve one style of page-numbering.
  And so you can't cross-reference between the Preface and the rest
  of the book. Since a fairly common thing to do in a Preface is
  refer to other parts of the book, this is a pretty stupid state of
  affairs. Furthermore, cross-referencing does not recognize
  footnote numbers - you can cross-reference to a footnote, all
  right, but you can't obtain the footnote number as part of the
  reference. So you can't say, "See p. 58, n. 7." But since this is
  the kind of thing I need to say all the time, Nisus's cross-
  referencing doesn't do me much good. Considering the fact that
  Word has absolutely no cross-referencing features at all though,
  Nisus will still be more useful than Word, especially at the more
  simple cross-referencing tasks.
 
  There is a Table of Contents facility. You mark the text that you
  wish included in the table of contents; such marking can be made
  visible. When you are ready, you use Make Contents to create a
  rudimentary document consisting of text followed by page numbers.
  The text loses all styling, and every entry looks the same. You
  will have to play with the look of this document before you can
  use it, so the lack of support for automatic hierarchical contents
  may not be of any great concern.
 
  The Indexing facility is more flexible. You can either mark text
  for direct inclusion in the index, or mark the text and associate
  it with the phrase that you wish entered in the index (so that
  stretches of text can be referenced by the subject they discuss).
  At the same time you can also designate a heading to be added to a
  "See Also" list that will appear at the end of the index entry. If
  you wish to reference one stretch of text under more than one
  index entry, though, you have to resort to trickery; the manual
  suggests you enter the index headings right into your text, mark
  them for indexing, and then make them invisible. The find-and-
  replace facilities "know" about indexing; you can automatically
  find for particular words and index them under particular entries,
  find for text already marked under particular headings, and so
  forth (you could even index every word in the document if you
  wanted). Finally, as with the Table of Contents, when your text is
  marked as you want it, a single command generates your index.
  Disappointingly, however, you can only have two levels of
  indexing; worse, you cannot index text in footnotes at all (which
  is ridiculous, since most of what I want indexed is probably in
  the notes). Nevertheless, if you are willing to plan ahead and to
  add a goodly quantity of manual labour at the end, you will find
  that the indexing facility generates a very decent basis for
  composing your index.
 
  You can automate powerfully the marking-up of your document both
  for indexing and for table of contents. A User-Defined Style can
  include a Table of Contents designation that will cause text
  marked with it to be collected when the table of contents is
  built; by marking text with several different Styles (not
  necessarily with any visible effect), you can mark for several
  different tables of contents, collecting each separately by
  turning on the Table of Contents option for just one Style at a
  time. The same is true for indexing, so you could create multiple
  indexes this way; but you can do this only if you want the text
  from the document used directly as the index entry. More likely
  you would build multiple indexes by using the Find/Replace
  facility (perhaps with the help of Colors or Styles) and marking
  up your whole document for one index, building it, then unmarking
  it and marking it up for a different index.
 
  There is a Sort command, but it is very rudimentary; the only
  thing you can sort by is paragraph-start. The sort knows the
  difference between words and numbers, and will separate paragraphs
  that start with words from those that start with numbers. You can
  also force an ASCII-order sort. But the sort is not font-
  sensitive, and there is no way to tell it that you might be using
  a different alphabet.
 
  The current date and time can be inserted in the document. They
  are not automatically updated, which can be a good thing; if you
  want them updated, you can either cause it to be done yourself
  with a menu command, or set a preference that causes it to be done
  just before every Print. A few formats are provided for the date,
  but not enough; fortunately the date format responds to your
  setting in the System's "itl1" resource, so you can make up for
  this to some extent.
 
  Nisus comes with the usual mail merge facilities. It is no harder
  to use than any other mail merge facilities I know about, and
  seems to be very full-featured (it has conditionals, Include,
  prompting, and so on). Word 5.0's mail merge was significantly
  improved from Word 4.0, but according to the people at Macworld
  Australia, who swear by Nisus, Nisus's mail merge is cleaner than
  Word's mail merge.
 
  A line-numbering feature is included, but I can't imagine what
  it's good for. You cannot pick a stretch of lines to be numbered:
  you can only number the whole document, by page or in full. And
  you don't get much control over where the numbers are to appear.
 
  There is an automatic parenthesis checker, to make sure your
  parentheses are balanced. I find this sort of useless because even
  though it is somewhat configurable it doesn't take account of the
  fact that the code for parenthesis delimiters may differ for
  different fonts, and so if I'm using any Greek it gets the answer
  wrong.
 
  Spell-checking is included. I've never seen a spell-checker I
  liked and this one doesn't change my mind. I am told that the User
  Dictionary is limited to about 3000 words, although this has not
  proved to be a serious problem in normal use. Paragon also has
  foreign language dictionaries available, though I've never used
  them and can't comment on how well they work. The spell-checker
  has some bugs: it highlights words with punctuation within them
  (such as apostrophe) incorrectly, so they can't be replaced or
  corrected properly, and if the checker asks you about a word and
  you tell it to Ignore other occurrences of that word, it sometimes
  fails to do so. Adam contends that Nisus's spell-checker is very
  fast, much faster than Word's for instance, and is more full
  featured than most. For instance, Nisus has a built-in Ignore
  Spelling style, and when you click the Ignore button, that word
  will be ignored for the rest of that document's life (or is
  supposed to be; bugs remain), an incredibly useful feature in
  comparison to word processors that can only skip words or add them
  to the dictionary. Adding words to the User Dictionary is easy,
  but removing them is a slow and tedious task if you have any
  number in there. Luckily Paragon ships some macros with Nisus that
  can export a User Dictionary and import a list of words into a
  User Dictionary, so you can fix the list and then let it import at
  its leisure.
 
  A thesaurus is included; it too is about as mediocre as these
  on-line thesauruses usually are, and of course you can't modify it
  in any way, but on occasion it can be helpful if you like
  thesauruses.
 
  There is automated hyphenation, but it never prompts you for help
  with a word, it just goes ahead and hyphenates: you cannot set how
  much of a word you think needs to be washing over the margin
  before hyphenation should be invoked, or correct Nisus's
  hyphenation of a word as it sets it. Since I don't think any
  machine knows better than I do how I want words hyphenated, I
  never use this feature.
 
  The glossary facility is good. You can create multiple glossaries
  (though only one can be loaded at a time), and glossary files are
  themselves editable. A glossary entry may include character
  styling attributes, or can be set to take on the attributes of
  surrounding text. Even a graphic can be a glossary entry. You
  cause a glossary entry to go into your text just by typing an
  abbreviation; you can then cause the actual text to be substituted
  for the abbreviation immediately, by a menu command, or later on,
  by selecting text and ordering all abbreviations within the
  selection to be expanded to their equivalents.
 
  A Get Info command obtains such data about your document as the
  number of pages, paragraphs, lines, words, and characters; also
  included are the average and maximum length of sentences, and
  something called Flesch Reading Ease and Resulting Reading Grade
  Level. You'll be happy to know you're mastering a grade 16
  document here, whatever that may mean. But do you really believe
  the average length of a word in this review is 4? Other word
  processors either don't reveal this information or, like Word 5.0,
  make you jump through hoops to get it.
 
  A number of interesting preferences can be set. You can have
  backup and autosave of documents. The autosave, which is regulated
  by number of characters typed (though one would like a combination
  of that and time and actions, since you don't type much when
  making a lot of editing changes), can save the original file, a
  .bak file, and even a copy of the original file to another
  location of the hard drive. Under System 7 there is a clever trick
  to make Nisus save its secondary documents in the Trash, where
  they'll stay until you consciously delete them: you boot under
  System 6, select the Trash folder for the secondary save, and then
  save the preferences. When you reboot under System 7 again, Nisus
  will stuff those secondary files in the Trash where they'll sit
  until you throw them out or until you lose an original file. No
  other program except WordPerfect lets you do this, but it's the
  ultimate backup technique. The whole autosave milieu is a lot
  better than Word 5.0 with its auto-reminder that pops up every few
  minutes and asks you if you want to save. "Of course I want to
  save, you idiot program!"
 
  You can set the size of the Undo list (important if you are
  running short of memory). You can supposedly regulate the maximum
  scroll speed for when you hold down a scroll-arrow but I think
  this is broken; I couldn't get the actual speed to rise above
  about 6 lines at a time. Adam also especially appreciates the Auto
  Indent preference. With this turned on, if you indent a line with
  a tab or a few spaces and hit <return>, Nisus will automatically
  indent the next line by the same tab or number of spaces. If
  you're typing in a list of things, Auto Indent is invaluable. If
  you want to avoid extra spaces, Nisus can also remove leading and
  trailing blanks as you type, but Adam admits he finds this a tad
  disconcerting.
 
  Nisus page headers and footers work in a simple and powerful way.
  A header (or footer) is considered to be "attached" to a paragraph
  of the document (actually to the Return at the end of it), and it
  affects pages only after that paragraph appears, supplanting any
  earlier header. This means that as part of the act of creating a
  section heading you could attach a header to the section heading;
  the header on each page would then reflect the current topic. A
  given header or footer can be set to appear on all pages, even
  pages, or odd pages. A minor thing that I dislike is that headers
  and footers are regarded as inviolate separate regions of the
  page; they cannot infringe vertically upon the main text, meaning
  that they are useless for achieving certain layout effects.
 
  Printing in Nisus is remarkably good. The Page Setup dialog lets
  you dictate a completely custom paper size. The Print dialog lets
  you print just the odd or even pages, thus making double-sided
  printing easy, unlike even Word 5.0. Further, the Page Layout
  window, in addition to extremely flexible facilities for setting
  or changing the document margins (including a gutter so that the
  look of left and right pages can mirror each other), includes a
  Two-Up option which permits two pages to appear on one sheet of
  paper, automatically rearranging the page order at print time so
  that if you print on both sides of the paper you will end up with
  sheets that you can staple in the middle to make a booklet. (You
  can also cause a frame to appear around every page of a document,
  but it can only be very rudimentary, and you have only rudimentary
  control over what it will look like.) If you wish, you can even
  set a preference so that Nisus prints Last to First.
 
 
A Miscellany of Nits
--------------------
  I have said nothing up to now about the manual. I'll try to be
  brief about this: Unless it has been heavily rewritten since the
  version that came with Nisus 3.01, the manual is frankly bad.
  Inconsistencies and errors abound. On one page an option in the
  find/replace syntax is described as finding any character that is
  "not alphabetic, nor diacritical, nor underscore" when in fact it
  does find underscores; there are about ten more such errors on
  that page, which I had to straighten out by trial and error.
  Explanations are frequently written in a weird, substandard
  English. Paragon seems to need an academic professional both to
  advise it on features for Nisus and to rewrite the manual. Say,
  guys, for a small consulting fee At least Paragon ships a couple
  of small reference booklets to the macro and programming commands,
  so you don't really have to use the manual much.
 
  [Adam: We'd like to be able to say that the online help is great,
  but it's really clumsy. Actually, the online help and the manual
  suffer from the same problem - they were both done entirely in
  Nisus. Nisus is just not a serious publishing tool. Do you think
  Microsoft completely does their manuals in Word? Not a chance -
  for one thing it doesn't do color separations or page impositions.
  You write a manual in Nisus or Word and then import it into a real
  page layout program for layout and printing. Same thing goes with
  the online help. Sure Nisus can do it with a little funky
  programming, but I'd far rather have a slick custom-programmed (or
  even HyperCard) help facility. I admire Paragon for using Nisus
  for everything, but in this case, I'd recommend that they go to a
  good graphic designer for the manual and whip up a clever help
  facility in their spare time. Matt didn't mention this, but he
  whipped up an electronic cheat sheet for a lot of the more obscure
  commands in Nisus along with the syntax and options for the
  Find/Replace functions. It's terribly useful little DA - Matt used
  Bill Steinberg's Text DA - and one which I consider invaluable if
  you're using macros in particular.]
 
  When you start up Nisus it takes a full 30 seconds (on my LC) from
  double-clicking the application or a document until it is ready to
  work. I wouldn't describe this as unconscionably long, but it
  certainly does mean that when I have something I just want to jot
  down quickly, or a large text-only document that I just want to
  look into quickly, I reach for Microsoft Word (or I used to: now
  Word 5.0 is slow as well). What can these programs be doing all
  that while?
 
  Nisus is a mighty hog of CPU time when in the foreground, and can
  even slow things down a bit when in the background because its
  windows can be a mite slow to redraw. It can also be a mighty RAM
  hog; your whole document and anything else that has to be open
  during a project must be in memory all at once, for there is no
  facility for chaining small documents together. But of course this
  is only true if you want to work on lots of documents at once or
  on very large documents; and as Adam points out, considering the
  amount of memory that Word 5.0 wants and needs, Nisus no longer
  looks like such a RAM hog with its 700K minimum request. Perhaps
  one should call Nisus a RAM snob; if you need to use cross-
  referencing, you're only going to write a book with Nisus if
  you've got the money to buy the RAM to hold the whole thing.
 
 
Nisus Conclusions
-----------------
  Adam and I each get a separate say here, since our differing uses
  for a computer give us differing orientations on Nisus (though we
  are in agreement over the details of Nisus's strengths and
  weaknesses).
 
  [Matt] For large documents with layout needs such as tables, Nisus
  cannot compete with Word. But it is perfect for what I bought it
  for: conversion of documents from other formats into Mac format.
  On the other hand one would rather compose the basic text of a
  document in Nisus than in any other word processor I know. In
  fact, Nisus's find-and-replace and macro facilities are so handy
  and powerful, and its Rulers and Styles so convenient, that one is
  actually tempted to use it also as a sort of front end for
  Microsoft Word: Nisus can read Microsoft Word files with some
  small loss of information, and (surprisingly) can write files as
  Microsoft Word 3.0, again with some loss of information. (It can
  also read MacWrite I files and carry formatted text across to
  MacWrite via the clipboard.) It can actually be worth the slight
  loss of information across the boundaries to convert a document
  from Word into Nisus, edit it, and convert it back again.
 
  [Adam] Since I don't create formal documents as Matt does, I don't
  use Word at all. In the past I used Word occasionally to convert
  those Fast-Saved documents that Nisus couldn't open. Now I don't
  even have to do that, because there is a completely undocumented
  feature in Nisus 3.06. If you have Claris's XTND translators
  installed and hold down the option key when opening a file, Nisus
  will open any document for which you have a translator. Since
  there is an XTND package available for anonymous FTP on
  ftp.apple.com, I recommend that anyone who has had to deal with
  different document formats in Nisus check it out. In addition, if
  your XTND translator has export capability (not all do, I gather)
  you can do an option-Save As to export a Nisus file to another
  file format using XTND!
 
  [Matt] But although I love Nisus's look-and-feel, and give its
  creators an A for effort in their rethinking of how a word
  processor can operate on the Mac, the point I keep returning to is
  that despite my genuine longing to use Nisus as my sole word
  processor of choice, I cannot. Things that I find constantly
  necessary that are easy in Word - the writing and appearance of
  footnotes, placing paragraphs in complex ways, tables and side-by-
  side paragraphs - are clumsy, difficult, or downright impossible
  in Nisus. These things won't change until Paragon recognizes the
  problems and makes time to fix them, something which can be
  difficult for a small company that provides at least seven
  different language versions of its software. Those of us who want
  a word processor with the features needed to write a book without
  the expense of a full page-layout program are going to have to go
  on, for better or for worse, riding a different train. But don't
  forget: I wouldn't be writing these words if I didn't love so much
  about Nisus as to wish fervently that it _would_ fix its tables
  and footnotes and beat the pants off the Microsoft juggernaut.
 
  [Adam] Here's where Matt and I differ most strongly. I agree the
  footnote facilities could be lots better, and there are some
  quirks with the way styles and rulers interact at times, but when
  it comes right down to it those are document processing and page
  layout features. I feel that Paragon added those features to
  compete in the advertising check box wars with Word, not because
  they wanted to make Nisus into a serious page layout tool. Nisus
  is and always has been a text processor, not an document
  processing tool.
 
  The Mac helped break down the classical division between writers
  and printers, and that was good, but it doesn't mean that the
  division should be taken to the extreme so that every writer must
  also be a graphic designer and a printer. For those that dabble in
  it, like me, Nisus will do a little page layout and I find that I
  can use the graphics feature solely for my graphics needs. True
  designers seldom use anything less powerful than PageMaker or
  Quark XPress or FrameMaker for good reason - today's do-it-all
  word processors can't compare. However, if you need to produce
  formal documents and need sophisticated text entry and
  manipulation features, no one program can do that right now.
  Perhaps you should use Nisus as a front-end to Word, as Matt is
  tempted to do, or perhaps you should use Nisus along with
  FrameMaker, although that's more time and money than you may want
  to invest in the final document. Nisus just won't do it all now -
  so send your suggestions to Paragon. But should Nisus do it all?
 
  I applaud Paragon's unique approach in writing a program that is
  not just another word processor because a large portion of the
  time spent creating any document must perforce be spent writing
  it. We _need_ better writing tools and Paragon has provided that.
  I'm even willing to jump to the other side of the fence and
  suggest that they should strip out the graphics and the Place Page
  feature and all those things that are merely lip service to the
  great god of desktop publishing. Rulers and styles can stay,
  because although you'd think they are only for formatting a
  document for printing, they do have plenty of other uses in
  manipulating and editing text that are not initially obvious.
  [Matt: And in a way I agree; my whole point is that Paragon should
  either make its bells and whistles fully useful or eliminate them
  altogether.] I'm sure that Paragon is considering these comments
  and those from other users seriously and will deal with many of
  them in future versions of Nisus, although I have no idea when we
  might see that next version.
 
  Nisus's true calling will come when Nisus XS, the module for 3.06
  that will enable full AppleEvents and interapplication
  communication, ships sometime this spring. What I'd like to see is
  all those programs that require sometime significant amounts of
  text editing, QuickMail, uAccess, FileMaker, PageMaker, etc., all
  link to Nisus's text editing and manipulation tools so we can have
  an advanced writing environment no matter where we're writing. Too
  many programs use Apple's limited TextEdit routines. Let's face
  it, Nisus stands no chance of taking over the word processing
  market from Word, but it would be an incredible coup if suddenly
  all the major programs could link to Nisus and use its full power
  in whatever context made sense. I congratulate Paragon on
  providing a program that stands out, a program with a difference,
  and I encourage them to continue on their unique and often
  misunderstood path.
 
 
Nisus Details
-------------
 
    Nisus 3.06
 
    Paragon Concepts
    990 Highland Dr., Suite 312
    Solana Beach CA  92075
    800/922-2993
    619/481-1477
 
    jon@weber.uscd.edu
    75300.1243@compuserve.com
    D0405@applelink.apple.com
 
Price and Availability:
  Nisus is readily available from most mail order houses for
  approximately $250. Educational discounts for $99 are available
  directly from Paragon, and sidegrade offers may also be available
  directly from Paragon if you already own another word processor.
  Contact Paragon for more information.
 
 
..
 
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