Product ReviewsOperating systems
A nagging worry surrounds any word processor with 'version 6' after its name. The omens aren't good: the sixth version of Microsoft Word marked a nadir in that program's development, while AppleWorks 6.0 was sluggish and bug-ridden. The good news is that such complaints can't be levelled at Nisus Writer 6.0. In its first big upgrade for nearly five years, it's as nimble and undemanding as ever, but at the same time it lacks a couple of crucial features that would make it a supremely versatile word processor. Nisus Writer has long boasted a range of genuinely useful tools that any serious writer will appreciate. Unlimited undos, up to 10 simultaneous - and easily selectable - clipboards, as well as non-contiguous text selection which supports full drag and drop. The excellent Find feature, although still suffering from the odd aesthetic glitch, puts the weaker versions found in other word processors to shame. Housed in an expansible dialog box, its three-tiered service affords the power of multiple-file GREP searches, as well as allowing you to search by features such as style, or strip out HTML tags in a document. You can even create macros to fully automate subsequent searches. Available as both a boxed version or 30Mb download, Writer is also an excellent choice for those who write in more than one language. The program links with Mac OS 9's Apple Language Kits and provides support for Cyrillic and right-to-left languages, with extra spelling dictionaries available on a separate CD. The program's support of text-to-speech isn't unusual, but the ability to read back text accurately in five European languages certainly is. To those who wonder just what Apple and Microsoft put in their word processors to make their files unreadable by older versions, Nisus is a revelation, as it
The quality of its existing features inevitably casts a small shadow over the new arrivals to Writer's arsenal, none of which is as outstanding. The most impressive is the Grammar Checker, which complements the excellent dictionary and thesaurus, although the new Glossary Expansion feature, which automatically expands abbreviations as you type, runs it close. It's harder to believe that the Text Analyzer, which lists document-specific data such as the frequency of words in a file, is a universally useful addition, but it could be a useful starting point for an index. Contextual menu and Navigation Services support has been added, although in the darker corners of the program, you'll still encounter odd areas that look as if they haven't been touched since System 6 days. Meanwhile, Writer's implementation of its Zoom tool exemplifies the program's quirkiness. Rather than enlarge the whole page, the Zoom window magnifies the area around the cursor. It's an unusual idea, but it works surprisingly well in practice. For all its good features, Writer still shows weaknesses that scream for attention. If you're used to Word's outlining features, bad news: there's nothing approaching that functionality in Writer. The table tool - a separate application that hooks on clumsily to the main program - has been tinkered with, but you still can't create tables across separate pages. Thanks to the lack of database integration, creating a mail merge is more convoluted than AppleWorks or Word 2001. Toolbars aren't dockable, nor can they be customised, unless you're prepared to indulge in a bit of under-the-hood hacking. Still, none of these drawbacks can be regarded as critical. Writer is a word processor in the truest sense, with scant time for Wizards or multimedia interaction. It's svelte and responsive - a far more powerful text editor than AppleWorks, and more of a Mac application than Microsoft Word could ever hope to be. By Tom Gorham |
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