Filed under: Software, Productivity
Big changes in Nisus Writer Pro 1.1
In the latest skirmish in the endless battle for word processor supremacy, Nisus Writer Pro has been updated to version 1.1. The new features include enhanced commenting, a Mail Merge capability that uses the Mac OS X Address Book or csv files for a record source, a vastly improved Table of Contents generator, indexing, bookmarks for navigation or cross-references, an enhanced Nisus Macro Language (take that, Microsoft!), and the ability to embed Perl scripts. There are even more features, so visit the Nisus site for details.
Nisus does a great job of listening to their customers, and it appears that Nisus Writer Pro 1.1 has included many of the features requested by users of the initial release. The download version of Nisus Writer Pro 1.1 is $79 to new users, $49 for owners of Nisus Writer Express and free to owners of Nisus Writer Pro 1.0. A 15-day free trial download is available for this Universal Binary app (Mac OS X 10.4 or better required).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
SPower said 4:12PM on 5-25-2008
I've been trying this out and it is nice. A true word replacement that uses RTF as its native format (so all your files are highly transportable among apps). The sticking point for me is the price. $79 for a word processor is steep when the full MS Office suite is $129 and iWork is $69. It is particularly pricey when you consider that in both suites the word processor (Word and Pages, respectively) have a richer feature set, especially when it comes to adding media to your documents. There are still reasons I prefer Nisus Writer Pro, but a that price I feel like I'm getting ripped off!. $49 for the Pro version and $29 for the Express would be more like it.
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RobK said 6:55PM on 5-25-2008
The price for the MS Office Suite is MUCH higher than $129. It is $399!
Perhaps, you were referring to the Student and Teacher Edition of MS Office. Unfortunately, most people are not students or teachers so they cannot legally use this version of Office.
Perhaps, you should have compared Nisus Writer to the Free NeoOffice. In my View, it is hard to pay for any Office Suite or Word Pro app, when NeoOffice is very good, improving with each release and Free!
SPower said 7:15PM on 5-25-2008
NeoOffice is okay on the free and full of features front, but my experience is that it is buggy and not exactly resource light (what with it running in java and all). My comparison was to other OS X native word processors. Nisus is still $10 more than the full iWorks suite.
By the way, the cheapest Office 2008 version is Home and Student, not Student and Teacher (that was 2004). In other words, if you are using Office for personal use, you can pay $129 from Amazon (or even $130 as a direct download from Microsoft's site). The higher price packages are essentially special feature packages.
SPower said 8:06PM on 5-25-2008
For the record, what I think is great in Nisus is its speed, small resource footprint (Word 2008 is a monster), beautiful OS X Cocoa goodness combined with a really thoughtful UI, nice font rendering (Pages big downfall), and native use of a common format (another Pages problem). I would happily pay for this kind of elegant, OS X native quality (over free, less elegant options). My point was that $80 seems just too high given the other native Mac options.
RobK said 9:51PM on 5-25-2008
Thanks for point out the name change from "Student and Teacher" to "Home and Student". That is great news for those who want to use Office in the home. But if you want to legally use Office for business etc, you must pay the regular price of $399 for MS Office 2008 for the Mac. Ouch. That is expensive.
SPower said 11:59PM on 5-25-2008
Well, pricing by use gets complicated. If you really want a word processor for a business deployment (i.e. more than a 1 person home business), then you legally need multiple licences. Office comes with 4 licences as far as I understand it (they have additional pricing for 5 and up). The $79 Nisus price is single user, so if you want that for a true multiple-user business environment, the price will also be higher. On the positive side, I just discovered that Nisus Writer Pro has a $39 academic price for the download version (via a small link underneath the big buy button on their site). That is more like it. They should publicise this a little more.
Turki said 7:50PM on 5-25-2008
I use express and the only reason I'm using nisus is its support for Arabic, being a native Arabic speaker I do often need to use Arabic. Nisus is a nice product but its expensive and nowhere as good as office or iwork, but its support for Arabic which office completely ignores and iwork poorly supports makes it my choice for a word processor.
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Brian E said 8:47PM on 5-25-2008
I'm somewhat surprised to hear that Pages has poor support for Arabic (and presumably other right-to-left languages like Hebrew). What did Nisus do to make Arabic work better? Is there something that Cocoa programmers should be made aware of here?
Turki said 11:43PM on 5-25-2008
Pages has no RTL support, it supports Arabic input but no RTL which makes it half useable. Nisus does a great job at supporting RTL.
Patrick said 12:55PM on 5-26-2008
If you need Arabic support, I recommend checking out Mellel (http://www.redlers.com). It has fantastic RTL support for most all Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Syriac), and beautiful typography that puts Nisus and Pages to shame.
As a side note, since Nisus switched to Cocoa, they've been trying to build themselves back up to where Nisus Writer used to be under Classic, and are almost to the point where their program was 10 years ago ... a long time to reinvent the wheel if you ask me.
Turki said 5:25PM on 5-26-2008
Thanks Patrick, I know of Mellel and its a great RTL word processor and the best out there when it comes to RTL support, however i am no fan of its UI which made me a Nisus user.
alansky said 8:12PM on 5-26-2008
"...what I think is great in Nisus is its speed, small resource footprint (Word 2008 is a monster), beautiful OS X Cocoa goodness combined with a really thoughtful UI, nice font rendering (Pages big downfall)..." --SPower
What are you talking about? Pages uses the OS X font rendering engine and displays type beautifully. Clarification, please.
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Frankenstein said 10:53AM on 6-20-2008
Pages, as a matter of fact, does not use the text engine provided by the OS (the same text engine that is used by TextEdit, Nisus Writer Pro and a whole number of Cocoa applications); instead, it uses WebKit, i.e. the engine that powers Safari and OmniWeb, to render fonts. Of course, your mileage may vary, but I find it hard to work with Pages over a longer period of time because fonts do not render as nicely as they would in applications using the OS's own text engine.
Hershl Hartman said 7:50PM on 6-20-2008
The 5/26 comments regarding Mellel leave me cold, as I find it is designed for users with far more expertise than I have or need. Its latest caper on my Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, running 10.4.11: it would not quit while I was trying to restart or to shut down. The "quit Mellel" was grayed out and none of the force-quit keyboard tricks worked. Only much later did OS X ask if I wanted to force quit. O, boy, did I ever!! Nisus Express for me.
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BZ said 10:15AM on 6-27-2008
The one thing that is still missing in Apple apps in general is full support for OpenType complex scripts (for instance, Indic scripts, used by one-sixth of humanity...). I need support for scripts like Kannada, Tamil and Bengali professionally. - Once Apple gets this right, my only reason for using Windhose will no longer exist, and I'll be a much happier person.
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