Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Nisus Writer Pro

William Porter:

As I worked on this review and reacquainted myself with Nisus Writer Pro, again and again I wrote a note about something I thought Nisus Writer Pro couldn’t do, and again and again I discovered that I was wrong. Here’s the executive summary: Nisus Writer Pro is a word processing power tool. This power does require a bit of effort to master, but compared to Microsoft Word, Nisus Writer Pro is remarkably user friendly.

If I used a word processor these days, it would probably be Nisus Writer Pro. I probably even have the floppy disk from one of the original versions somewhere. But over the years my workflow has inverted. Instead of writing in a word processing app that supports scripting, I now write markup in BBEdit and write code to process it. This seems like far from an ideal solution, but in practice it works. I’m still waiting for a product that handles writing, editing, and layout; flexible PDF, Apple Help, Web, and e-book output; includes; version control, change tracking, and text comparison. Nisus Writer Pro and, to a lesser extent, Pages seem to be approaching this holy grail but aren’t there yet.

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