What is Nisus Writer 4?

Now renamed and greatly revised, Nisus Writer 4.0 retains the trademark features that distinguished its predecessor, Nisus, from other word processors on the market. Unfortunately, it also remains a mixed bag.

Particular Powers

Nisus can undo/redo an unlimited number of past actions. It allows you to select noncontiguous pieces of text. It has a powerful macro language — two languages, actually: a less powerful but more comprehensible Command Dialect, and a full-featured, rather daunting Programming Dialect. There’s also a watch-me macro-recording mode and a large library of useful, annotated, ready-to-use macros. Nisus Writer also retains Nisus’s legendary and still unequaled find-and-replace functions. The program offers three kinds of find and replace, in fact, so basic users won’t be ovenwhelmed with detailed, power-user codes. And Nisus Writer, like its earlier incarnations, has powerful multilanguage skills found in no other word processor.

Nisus Writer of course has all the basic writing and formatting tools, plus smart cut and paste (which adds or removes spaces as needed), smart quotes, easy-to-edit and automatically expanding glossaries, and a ten-compartment clipboard. It does not, however, offer a builtin outliner, as-you-type error correction, or drag and drop between documents — all present in the current versions of Microsoft Word and WordPerfect. It can number lists, but the process is cumbersome. It has tool bars, but they aren’t customizable, they float (and thus get in the way on a small screen), and many of the tool icons are indecipherable. Nisus Writer has both paragraph and character styles, but you can’t define styles by example; and Nisus doesn’t use styles intelligently to, for example, automatically apply styles to footnotes, table-of-contents entries, or indexes. And like previous versions, Nisus Writer 4.0 suffers from a poor, inefficient interface design.

Though it lacks a grammar checker, Nisus Writer comes with a collection of high-end editing tools. Its spelling checker is fast and efficient..., and its thesaurus is among the best. But because you can’t edit its rules, Nisus Writer’s hyphenation feature is definitely not high-end.

Nisus Writer is unique among word processors in that it can also read aloud, with proper pronunciation, your English, French, Spanish, German, or Italian text. It also supports WorldScript and allows you to write in any number of languages — whether they run left to right or right to left — in one document. For right-to-left scripts, Nisus has matching rulers and footnotes. Oddly, you cannot mark roman text as French, Spanish, or whatever, so that the program will automatically use the appropriate spelling checker, hyphenation file, and thesaurus.

The Long and Short of It

Nisus Writer can insert both footnotes and endnotes, but not both within a document. It can generate single-level tables of contents, but generating additional lists for the same document, such as a figure list, is unnecessarily difficult. Cross-referencing other parts of the document is also more difficult than need be. Nisus Writer can compile indexes (single-level only) from marked words (marked manually or using a handy find-and-replace option) or from a concordance, which it can help you create by generating a list of all the words in the document.

Nisus Writer comes witli Design Science’s MathType 3.0, a highly regarded equation editor. Nisus’s table editor (Macreations’ Tycho TableMaker), however, is seriously flawed, primarily because it cannot create tables more than one page long; nor can it split a table over two pages. Also, many Nisus features — such as unlimited undo and noncontiguous selection — don’t function within a table, and you cannot mark table text for a cross-reference or index or table-of-contents entry. Another disappointment is Nisus Writer’s mail merge function: as with most antiques, hard manual labor is the only thing that makes it work.

More than Words Can Say

With the program’s built-in, small-scale drawing program you can draw directly on the page. You can also import graphics in PICT, EPS, TIFF, and MacPaint formats, as well as QuickTime movies. Nisus Writer can insert graphics behind text to create a watermark and can use a Nisus Writer page as a graphic within another page. It allows only one column format for the entire document, and all columns must be the same width. Because the only view that displays graphics and multiple columns as they will print is not editable, creating complex, multicolumn layouts is a considerable chore.

Nisus Writer maintains menus of recently used files and user-specified “essential” files, and has a convenient Catalog window from which you can open or print files in batches. Nisus Writer files are readable by most other word processors (as unformatted text), and the program can read any file format for which it has an XTND filter (only MaeWrite II, RTF, and Word 4 and 5 filters are provided). Its five manuals come to 1100 pages, are poorly organized, and have no central index.

The Last Word

Still a David among the Goliaths of high-end word processing, Nisus Writer is difficult to assess concisely. It is a poor choice for many typical high-end uses, including long or multicolumn documents, table creation and editing, and mail merge. In a few specialized areas, however — such as mixing English and other non-Romance languages (Japanese, for example), and its complex find and replace — Nisus Writer is unmatched. If your word processing needs closely match Nisus Writer’s limited strengths, go for it. If not, head for Word (5 or 6) or WordPerfect.

Eckhardt, Robert C. (March 1995). Nisus Writer 4.0. Macworld. (pg. 53).

Download Nisus Writer 4 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II