Product ReviewsOffice software
Nisus Writer is back. Not that it really went anywhere, but when Apple switched to Mac OS X, the full-blown word processor faltered. In its place we had Nisus Writer Express, a compact word processor with all the compatibility, but none of the overhead, of Microsoft Word. Now, after several months of public beta testing, the biggie is back, in the form of Nisus Writer Pro. The interface is the same as Express, albeit with little smartening up, but under the skin there's a range of more powerful features, such as tables of contents, bookmarking and widow and orphan control. It also has a range of features not found in rival products, such as non-contiguous selections. It's a nifty trick that lets you select 'Nisus Writer is' 'a compact' 'Microsoft Word' from our opening paragraph and paste them elsewhere as a single flowing sentence, inaccurate though the sentiment might be. There's a full-screen mode for the poorly disciplined and easily distracted, an integrated thesaurus that displays alternatives for your most recently typed word (a feature you'll use more often than you think, and great that it's not hidden away in a right-click menu like it is in Word), and an elegant set of pre-defined styles to get you up and running. If this all sounds very familiar, you're probably an Express user already, as these are just a few of the features directly ported across. In fact, so similar are the two applications that any custom toolbars you've created in Express pop up in Pro, and any styles you change in Pro are similarly changed in Express. Needless to say these both work in reverse, too. Writer Pro ships with a massive library of powerful macros that span the full gamut from simple date-stamping to working out sums in embedded tables, including averages across rows and columns. Text analysis tools
In use it's stable and fast. We conducted our tests on an iMac G5 1.8GHz with 768MB of Ram, and it found and replaced 94 instances of the word 'and' in a 3000 word document in 0.84 seconds. Word took just under two seconds to perform the same action. They were neck and neck in startup, both taking six seconds. However, while it can read and write native Word files, Nisus Writer Pro didn't render them perfectly. The differences were minimal, and we were impressed that it understood imported styles, correctly applying them to existing style names, but small elements like underscored lines, which are effectively a bottom border on an invisible table, didn't make it across. Bulleted lists in Word files were outdented when opened in Writer Pro, and tabbed tables were sometimes misaligned. Such comparisons also showed up the differences between the two systems' word count features, with Word believing that our formatting test document had 2041 words, and Writer Pro claiming it was a mere 2031. Such discrepancies are traditional between competing word processors, and depends on what each one considers to be a true 'word' (a hyphen, for instance, may count as a word in one but not the other). The trouble Nisus has in launching Writer Pro is that its nearest competitor - Writer Express - is simply too good. It delivers an enormous sub-section of the Pro edition's features, and will suit all but the most demanding, heavy-duty user. If you don't need to make indexes and tables of contents, and would rather do your desktop publishing in InDesign than a word processor, you could probably manage with Express, and save yourself $34 (£17). If, however, you want a speedy, robust word processor that is pleasant to use and will communicate effectively with your Word-using colleagues (at a fraction of the cost) then Writer Pro is an excellent choice. By Nik Rawlinson |
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