NisusWriter Pro Version 1.0.2

Reviewed by Ted Bade

Nisus Software http://www.nisus.com Released: November 20, 2007 $79 (digital) or $89 for CD. Upgrade from NisusWriter Express available). There is an option to purchase a printed manual. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later; Universal binary; 120 MB Hard Drive Space.
Strengths: Easy to use, uncluttered workspace, saves into other word processing formats.   Weaknesses: Some issues remain with Leopard. For a demo of this product: http://www.nisus.com/free/pro.php

 

Introduction

Fans of non-MS word processing applications will be happy to hear that the people at Nisus have released the Pro version of their terrific word processing program. Appropriately it is called, NisusWriter Pro (NWP). NWP is a full features word processing program that is easy to use, provides a clean uncluttered workspace, with a true Macintosh-like interface.

 

NisusWriter Pro has all the typical features you would expect from a word processor and they all work great. It can do tables, work with styles, include URLs, add graphics, footnotes, headers, and everything else you would expect. Nisus was the first word processor to actually include noncontiguous selection of words (although everyone has that now), and supports a variety of languages, even those that are read from right to left. The earlier version, NisusWriter Express, is a terrific word processor. The Pro version adds a lot of features and some nice polish.

One of the things I liked most about NisusWriter is the uncluttered workspace it provides. Most of the space is your text, there is a small control area in the top brushed aluminum area of the window and you can choose to open and close a tool panel, along the right side of the document. Users of NisusWriter Express will notice that the icons in this top area are now in color.

 

 

 

This area can be customized to show either Icons or Text or both together. It can also be customized, letting the user add or subtract whatever they don’t think they will use. You can choose to make the icons smaller if you feel they are taking up too much real estate. I don’t use a lot of the fancy word processing features in my day-to-day writing. To me it is more important to have space for my text. With MS Word, I always feel crowded, having just enough room for a paragraph of my writing to show. Working in NWP’s uncluttered and spacious environment is a real treat.

 

An additional tool area opens or closes on the side of the document window and includes four default palettes. It can be customized to show those tools that you find most useful. For myself, I like to see font information, the document stats and the Thesaurus window (called Language for some reason). There are a lot of items you can view in the various palettes.

 

This area also provides easy access to manipulating fonts, paragraphs, tables, borders, margins and much more. Since the user can customize this area, it it relatively easy to add any item you find useful or extract those you never use. If you don’t want to see the tools side panel, it can be closed with a click on the Tools icon.

 

In addition to this, NWP includes floating palettes that you can pull up if you need them. These are the same palettes you see in the side tool are, but they float on the screen. As with the tool bar, you can bring them up or dismiss them as needed.

 

Of course, as with any Mac OS application, NisusWriter Pro includes a plethora of keyboard shortcuts. You can modify the keyboard shortcuts as well as add shortcuts to several other commands that do not have one. For myself, I generally stick with the basic keyboard shortcuts. I did create one when I used earlier versions of Nisus for Mac OS X, this shortcut would “paste text only”, a function I use often in my writing. With NisusWriter Pro, this already comes setup with a default keyboard shortcut. I also noticed you can set up a keyboard shortcut for to “Print as a PDF”, which is another function I find myself using a lot these days.

 

One of the major advantages of the NisusWriter family is their ability to work with non-English languages, including those that read from right to left. Changing to another Language is easy, just pull down the menu and select the language. There are 16 languages listed in the menu, and two “Tech” formats (URL and Email). However, there are many, many more that can be selected by using the “edit language” menu.

 

NisusWriter Pro offers a number of features that were not available in earlier version of NisusWriter Express. Lets take a quick look at some of them and see how they might help the typical user. We will start with the ability to easily make a Table of contents. To use this feature, you move through your document selecting headings and subheadings then telling NisusWiter to put them on level one, two, three or onward. For instance, you might have a chapter title, this would be on level one, then perhaps some areas in the chapter that feature sub-topics, these could be set to level two and so forth. When you are done selecting which text or headings are to be included at what level in your document, you then locate a place to insert the Table of Contents.

 

The resulting table shows those items you chose and on what page they are. Sub-headings are indented. This makes for a very nice presentation. You can change how the Table of Contents looks to suit your preferences, although I found the defaults to work very well.

 

Bookmarks can be inserted as a way to help a reader navigate to important parts of your document. I could see this as useful for any technical document. When you are done with the writing, you can go through the document and set bookmarks to the important subjects in it. This feature would be terrific if it would work with the “Save as PDF” function. However, I couldn’t get either Apple’s Preview or Adobe’s reader to show the bookmarks I made as I experimented. Maybe we will see this in a future release. Nevertheless, if you work with NisusWriter, bookmarks can make working through a large document easier.

 

Another new feature is the ability to easily create an index. Doing this is relatively easy. Open the Index palette, select a word from your text that you want to index, click to add it, then go to the next word and so on. Once all the terms you want are indexed, using the insert menu, you can insert your index. The default index format is nice, but you can easily modify the look of your index.

 

NisusWriter Pro also has some other nice features like preventing window orphans, lots of control for line numbers, and extensive macro language. Footnotes can span multiple pages, and more.

 

I really enjoy working with NisusWiter Pro. The only issue I ran into was due to upgrading my Mac to Leopard.

 

 

Addendum: The Leopard version was released and is working fine, according to Dave Larson at Nisus.

 

As far as I can see, it can save files that are compatible with MS Word. I even opened a review submission template made for Word, filled in all the important information, then saved the document in MS Word format. I asked my editor if there were any problems with working with my document and there were none. This template wasn’t just a basic one, it includes blocked areas, URLs, graphics lines, and a variety of text formatting. I am really happy I won’t have to run MS Word any more to complete my final submissions.

Conclusion

Lots of new features, easy to work with, a clean and uncluttered workspace all work together to make what is my opinion to be the best word processor option for the Macintosh platform. You can’t go wrong with this program. I use it for all my word processing needs and I highly recommend it.