One of the advantages of being small is that you can move fast. Paragon Concepts has updated its high-end word processor, Nisus, twice since the program's introduction in January 1989. In roughly the same time period, Microsoft has yet to update Word 4.0 even once. Although Nisus 2.0‘s improvements were fairly minor, version 3.0 is a significant step up.
Looking Good
Many of the changes in Nisus are cosmetic: Menus have been more logically arranged, commands have been renamed for clarity, and the master ruler has been redesigned. There are also small but extremely useful additions, such as a vertical ruler, noncontiguous selection of text, and antonyms in the thesaurus.
A small yet handy addition is the expansion of the allowable keyboard- command assignments. Nisus not only lets you assign keys in any combination with the Shift, Option, and Control keys but it also lets you assign multiple keystrokes. You may want to assign Command-G to execute the Display Graphics Palette command or Command-GI to select Get info. Nisus determines whether multiple keystrokes are one or two commands, based on the amount of time between strokes. This feature lets you assign mnemonic combinations, such as Command-IH for Insert Header or Command-IF for Insert Footer, and still be able to use the standard Command-I for italic.
Nisus now uses mail-merge standards (in previous versions, Nisus' nonstandard mail-merging was done with macros). Its cross-referencing capability has also been mproved to work more smoothly and logically. Macros for outlining and a clever appointment calendar have also been added.
Graphically Better
Nisus' graphics have been greatly improved. There are now two drawing layers, one above and one below the text layer. Graphics can be fixed on the page or anchored to a paragraph. New graphics commands include Rotate by 90°, Scale, and Duplication. Clicking on rotated text with the text tool rotates it back to its normal position for editing.
A major graphic enhancement is Page Graphics. This feature allows an entire document (child) to be placed as a graphic into your currently active document (parent). As a graphic, the placed page can he rotated, scaled, or cropped. The child file can be opened for editing by a doubleclick. (If the child file is not currently available, the placed page becomes a static graphic.) Page Graphics can be used to create documents with different numbers of columns or columns of different widths. It can also create documents with formatted, rotated text as well as pseudo-hypertext documents. Page Graphics is incredibly simple to use and provides Nisus with exceptional desktop-publishing capability.
Earlier versions of Nisus had text-based user styles; the new version adds named rulers. Ruler settings (margins, labs, line and paragraph spacing, and the like) can be named and added to the pop-down menu on the master ruler. Rulers can be searched for, renamed, and copied from one document to another — you simply copy and paste the ruler icon in the left margin. User styles can have named rulers associated with them, which gives users the option of purely text-based, purely ruler-based, or a combination of styles. New text style types include Do Not Spell Check, Index, and Table of Contents. The latter two can be used to create multiple indexes and tables of contents.
Searching and Macros
What gives Nisus its unparalleled power is its searching and macro capabilities. GREP (global regular expression parser) and Easy-GREP have been renamed Power Search + and Power Search, but they still provide the same ability to search for and replace text based on patterns, location, font, style, and other parameters. In addition, the macro language now has two parts: the Menu Command Dialect, which hasn’t changed from earlier versions, and the Programming Dialect, which is a full BASIC-like programming language. The Programming Dialect, described in a separate 45-page booklet, includes If and GoTo statements; math, Boolean, date/ time, and string functions; and variables and constants. Several of the macros in Nisus 3.0, such as the outlining and appointment-calendar macros, use the Programming Dialect. Other macros have been written to generate random math-problem sets with answer keys, to automatically format C programs, and to create a boomerang-like file list in the Catalog window.
The Menu Command and Programming Dialects have a similar relationship to each other as do Power Search and Power Search +. With Menu Command and Power Search, even fairly casual users can do complex searching and create useful macros. With Programming Dialects and Power Search +. users who are more experienced or intrepid can wield unprecedented amounts of power.
Nisus can read Microsoft Word 3.0x and 4.0 files and write Word 3.0x files. An Aldus filter is included so Nisus files can be placed in PageMaker 4.0. Files are kept in memory, which results in fast scrolling and searching, but file size is limited by the amount of RAM.
The program’s documentation has been completely rewritten and is generally clear and complete, although sometimes a lot of information is packed into a brief discussion.
The Bottom Line
Although Nisus has an intuitive design and is easy to learn and use, it is aimed at high-end users such as technical writers, lawyers, and others who need extensive control over long documents. Novices may be intimidated by the number of menu options, and there is no Short Menus option as there is in Word. For those who process a lot of words, however, Nisus is an excellent choice.
Iroff, Linda. (March 1991). Nisus. MacUser. (pgs. 47, 57).
Paragon Concepts
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2019-02-26 / 
2019-02-26 / 
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Nisus-Writer-3-01.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
