Fortunately, both Nisus Writer Pro and Express preserve one of Nisus’s original 1989 strokes of genius-namely, saving documents by default as RTF (Rich Text Format). If you share your documents with anybody else, file-format compatibility may be an important issue. While it didn’t make me yearn to be cloistered once again in the research library, I will admit that I was very impressed at how nicely the two programs work together. Back in my previous life as a university professor, I did all my bibliographies and footnotes “by hand.” For this review, I tested Nisus Writer Pro 1.4 with Bookends 10.6.1. For the kinds of merges that most of my clients have done over the years, Nisus Writer Pro does a terrific job and I can’t see how it could be made any easier.įor scholars, Nisus Writer Pro provides hand-in-glove integration with the very popular citation management program for Mac users,īookends from Sonny Software. (Tip: Use one-word placeholders, for example, FirstName instead of First Name.) And like Word, Nisus Writer Pro can also enter placeholders based on the evaluation of conditions, although this takes a wee bit of macro coding. It was a snap to pull data from a single group in my Address Book (or multiple selected groups, or all the records), but it was only slightly more difficult to export a merge (.mer) file from FileMaker Pro or a comma-separate value (.csv) file from Excel. I found creating my first simple merge document in Nisus Writer Pro much easier than doing the same thing in Microsoft Word. When it comes to merge tools, you may find that with Nisus Writer Pro you may not even need to read the documentation to merge. Want to add bookmarks and cross-references, so you (or your readers) can find their way around in long documents? No problem. Nisus Writer Pro can also lets you create an index and a table of contents. Nisus Writer Pro supports comments, and in my testing, I was able to move a commented document back and forth between Nisus Writer Pro and Word. Pro is designed for writing professionals and has the advanced document management features that are required by users who are not just writing, but producing documents. If you write long or complex documents, collaborate with others, or just want a clean, elegant word processor that you can customise to suit how you work, you should at least try the demo of Nisus Writer Pro 2 on your MacFormat disc.If Express as good as Pro in all those respects, why would anyone bother with Pro? Express is designed for students, business users, and, well, ordinary writers (which is to say, most users). It's a very different beast to apps such as iA Writer: it has similar complexity, power, and flexibility to Microsoft Word, with none of the bloat or – to some – irritating automation. You'll need to tinker to get the EPUB export right, such as for viewing/selling on iOS's iBooks app nevertheless, it's good to have the option. You can customise one of the panels in the Tooldrawer to suit.Īs well as some additional formatting and style options such as paragraph-level borders, shading, and document watermarks, this new version builds on its predecessor's rich tools for building structured documents by adding the ability to export PDFs (with clickable links for cross-references, tables of contents and more) and EPUB. One small but welcome feature is an easy way to add special characters to your documents. It would be foolish to think of it as a DTP package, however Pages is much better for DTP, though it's a weaker word processor than Writer Pro 2. Writer Pro 2 also adds some simple drawing tools – shapes, lines, floating text boxes – in a nod towards basic desktop publishing abilities. (Nisus's default file format is the widely supported RTF annoyingly, while Word opens RTFs with Track Changes turned on, Pages only seems to accept Track Changes in DOC/DOCX.) It's not without fault: though it can happily open DOC and DOCX formats so you can share files with Word-using colleagues on both Mac and PC, it converts them on opening, forcing a slightly awkward round-trip if you're pinging the same document back and forth. It gains support for Track Changes, making it easy to collaborate on documents, add comments and review changes made by other team members.
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