4.0628 R: Mac Formatters -- Nisus (2/89)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 23 Oct 90 23:25:50 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0628. Tuesday, 23 Oct 1990.
(1) Date: Tue, 23 Oct 90 09:32:13 EDT (68 lines)
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0620 Mac. formatters...
(2) Date: Tue, 23 Oct 90 09:49:44 EDT (21 lines)
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0620 Mac. formatters...
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 90 09:32:13 EDT
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0620 Mac. formatters...
The ultimate in word processing macro power is the Nisus word processor
from Paragon Concepts (800-922-2993 or 619-481-1477 and $99 educational
discount - call them, they're good people to deal with especially since
the president of Paragon is a professor at (I think) UC Berkeley)
Nisus has a full featured macro language that can use all of the commands
present on the normal Mac menus, but in the latest release (3.0) they've
even built in a small but capable programming language with stacks and
variables and all that jazz. The macros wouldn't be nearly so noticeable
though, if it weren't for what Paragon calls PowerSearch and
PowerSearch+. Basically PowerSearch+ is a full featured grep utility
and PowerSearch is a simplified, menu driven version of grep. For those
who aren't familiar with it, grep stands for Global Regular Expression
Parser and a regular expression is basically a pattern. So if I want to
find an address using I can search for either 5 digits or 5 digits, a
dash, and four more digits. That finds the US zipcode and from that
point it's trivial to select the rest of the address.
A few other features of Nisus that might be of interest to HUMANISTS...
Discontinuous selections, so if you want to select five words that are
not next to each other and make them all italic, it's a breeze with
Nisus. I don't currently know of any other word processor that does
this on any system, though I'm sure it's been done before.
Multiple language dictionaries, for those of us who write in more than
one language. Call Paragon for details on those, I don't use them
personally.
Styles, broken into User Styles that affect text, and Named Rulers, which
affect formatting. I find this to be a better way of handling styles than
Word's, where the character formatting is lumped in with paragraph and
page formatting, whether you want it or not.
A special "Don't Spell Check" style, which allows you to have Nisus
automatically ignore certain types of words, like phone numbers and email
addresses, which are always confusing to the spell checker. Coupled with
a macro, this style is incredibly useful. You can also Ignore words
caught by the spelling checker, which is a permanent style, rather than
only for that session like most other word processors.
An excellent thesaurus that includes definitions, synonyms, and
antonyms. I believe it is licensed from Microlytics, as is the WriteNow
thesaurus.
Simple, but effective graphics capabilities. I find them to be more than
enough for most of my graphics needs, but I'm pretty terrible with
graphics anyway.
There's a bunch more, including being able to create a search list of
closed files to search in as well as the open one(s), limited file
management, a configurable autosave, excellent customization options
(but none of that terrible menu moving that's in Word), and glossaries,
indexes, tables of contents, footnotes, and probably some other stuff I
don't use much.
If you do much text processing on the Mac, I highly recommend that you
check out Nisus. Apple will even be recommending it as the word
processor of choice for higher education and they write the rules :-)
.... Adam
Adam C. Engst pv9y@cornella.cit.cornell.edu
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor of TidBITS, the weekly electronic journal for the Macintosh.
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------29----
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 90 09:49:44 EDT
From: "Adam C. Engst" <PV9Y@CORNELLA>
Subject: Re: 4.0620 Mac. formatters...
Oh one thing I forgot to mention about Nisus in regard to the word
processing formats. Nisus saves all of its files as straight text
files, storing the formatting information in the resource fork of the
file. That way you can upload a Nisus file to a mainframe without
converting anything and any other word processor can read a Nisus file
easily (though with a loss of the formatting). Nisus also can read and
write Word format (I know it can read Word 4.0 but it might only be able
to write Word 3.0 - not positive on that because I never use Word any
more at all). Basically, Nisus is a good, fast, powerful word processor
for people who do a lot of writing and like to move their files around a
lot as well.
-Adam
Adam C. Engst pv9y@cornella.cit.cornell.edu
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor of TidBITS, the weekly electronic journal for the Macintosh.