Product Reviews

Nisus Writer Express is a development of the Mac OS X word processor formerly known as Okito Composer. The product is now slicker and more fully featured, but still retains the essential spirit of the original in that it's small, fast and intuitive.

First of the many features that mark it out as something special - and which should allay any fears if you are shackled to Microsoft Word - is Nisus Writer Express' compatibility with Word files. Writer can both open and save files in Word's .doc format as well as .rtf and plain text. In fact, Nisus Writer Express doesn't have its own native file format, so any word processing documents it saves can be opened in more or less fine. We tried it with documents containing images, columns, and headers and footers and all opened in Word, although at the time of writing there were a few glitches importing text in frames from Word documents. Nisus is working on a fix that should be posted by now.

Nisus Writer has a long history on the Mac, pre-OS X, and was the first to implement many novel features - some still not implemented in Word. You can, for instance, select non-contiguous text by holding down the command key. Once you've had this facility it's difficult to do without it. Also novel is the support for multiple clipboards. You can have as many of these as you want, and all remain live while Nisus Writer Express is open, but aren't saved after you quit. It would be useful if the clipboards' contents were saved as part of the document's description - but you'd need a proprietary file format for that. Another neat feature is the ability to hot-swap between clipboards using

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the keyboard, which makes inserting multiple, repeating character strings easy. Simply hit command-0 to make Clipboard 0 live and then command-v to paste its contents. Selections can also be appended to the text on the current clipboard, and clipboards can be opened for editing. Nisus Writer was also the first word processor on the Mac to support right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew. This facility is missing at the moment due to limitations in OS X, but Nisus says it will be implemented as soon as possible.

Sliding out

Because it's a Cocoa application, Nisus Writer Express uses slide-out drawers for accessing settings. There are three main drawers - Writing, Formatting and Sections - which are accessed from a drop-down menu at the top of the current drawer. You can also create new drawers using the Palette Libraries window: the Writing drawer contains the most-used functions: font size, Alignment, Spacing and - thank heavens - the Live Word Count feature. Formatting holds the Character-based controls and also has the Columns layout feature. Multiple non-equal columns are supported, and configuring them is a simple matter of pressing on a few arrow buttons for live resizing. The one feature missing, however, is any form of style sheet. The Sections drawer allows different formatting to be applied to different parts of a document. The Find/Replace functions also fit in this drawer and have the advantage that results are displayed in a pane in the drawer, and clicking on a result will take you to its place in the document. There's also a PowerFind option.

Multiple language support is big in Nisus Writer Express. Sections of a document can be flagged as being in a particular language, and the correct spelling dictionary will be applied to them. If required, the keyboard will also change to that language's layout when the cursor is in the relevant section. There's also a vast range of languages to choose from, including Hungarian, Sanskrit and Welsh, and there's a free, live English thesaurus included as well.

Nisus Writer Express is a welcome addition to the OS X writing tool collection: it does what it does with economy and style, and there's not a dancing paperclip in sight.