The Nisus Files: Converting to the Nisus Writer word processor

By Kirk Hiner

November 26, 2001

The thing about weddings, I guess, is that after you've gone through one, all the others seem so boring. I got married back in June, and this weekend I attended the wedding of my sister-in-law. Same church, same minister, and 30% or so of the same guests, so it was actually kind of creepy. I wasn't in the wedding party, thankfully, but my wife, Tieraney, was. I therefore had to sit through the rehearsal, attend the rehearsal dinner, and stay throughout the entire reception.

That was the painful bit...the reception. Were it not for the traditional Turkey Bowl football game that afternoon (in which, despite being pathetically out of shape, I managed to catch four touchdown passes in a losing effort), I would not have been able to suffer through the barrage of horrible, horrible wedding reception music. Does anyone really enjoy listening to Kool and the Gang? No. No one. And two line dances is five too many, if you ask me. Thank the good Lord "Mambo No. 5" wasn't played or I would have likely exploded.

So how did I suffer through all of this? Well, my wife is a pretty amazing dancer, and I can deal with crappy music at a reception if I get to watch her dance to it (thankfully, she hates line dancing as much as her cranky husband). Aside from the hoaky poetry to which I was subjected ("T'was the night before the wedding, and all through the town..."), visiting with the in-laws during the rehearsal dinner was entertaining enough. As for the rehearsal dinner...well, we're all Methodist, and the only thing shorter than a Methodist wedding is a Methodist wedding rehearsal. I easily passed the time by skimming a couple chapters of my Nisus Writer manual.

As you all accuse me of being a geek, which I'll accept since software manuals probably shouldn't be my reading material of choice, let me again cry out for Nisus to release a printed manual with future versions of Nisus Writer. The previous week, I'd been fumbling my way through the conversion of an old novel into Nisus format, and that twenty-minutes of skimming through the novel--away from my computer, even--were all I needed to figure out what I was doing incorrectly.

Trying to learn Nisus Writer's long document features, I decided to convert my second unpublished novel from Word to Nisus format. The initial process is simple enough; open the Word document, save the file in RTF, and open it again in Nisus. Trouble is, whether it be the fault of Nisus or--more likely--Word, the translation isn't flawless. Header and footer info became somewhat garbled, some basic formatting (of the variety usually retained in RTF transfers) was lost, and Nisus didn't like Word's tabbings. Nothing too difficult to clean up, though, as this is all pretty much standard stuff in file conversion.

The problem that struck me as most odd was in the line spacing. The original document was double spaced, as was the Nisus translation. However, many of paragraphs had two hard returns after them, all of which needed to be cleaned up. Word's smart quotes also had to be fixed, but this was handled simply enough with a Nisus macro as defined in the manual. Nisus has this great feature called PowerFind, which gives you amazing control over what needs to be found and replaced. For instance, say you wanted to make sure all your punctuation appears inside quotation marks (which it almost always should, no matter what you've been told), you would do a PowerFind for \(”)\(.|,|!|?|;|\:\) and replace it with \2\1. Simple as that. Well, simple assuming you have the manual to show the script and teach you how to write one yourself. Sure, it's all documented in the HTML manual included with Nisus Writer, but fat lot of good that would've done me on a Friday evening in the sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church of Ashland, Ohio.

And hey, while we're talking macros, does anyone have one to replace two hard returns with just one? It certainly would've saved me plenty of time with this conversion.

Also giving me trouble were the Paragraph Rulers. This feature allows you to easily define styles to be assigned to individual paragraphs. For instance, I've created different rulers for chapter titles, paragraph text, hanging quotation text and indented quotes. The rulers can be set to appear on the left side of the document, so changing between them is as simple as clicking on the ruler and making a choice from the drop down menu. Unfortunately, this menu does not appear on the selected ruler, but from the ruler feature in the menu bar. I'd like to able to control click to make the selection from the selected ruler icon.

Setting up these rulers is quite simple, editing them from within converted documents is not so easy. In my newly converted Word document, rulers seemed to be assigned only at random; some new paragraphs received them, others didn't. When I attempted to make changes to these, they would oddly affect those around them. Sometimes, the adjoining paragraph rulers would also switch, sometimes they wouldn't. When I had the benefit of being able to create a document from scratch, none of this abnormal behavior would appear. Rulers can be copied and pasted between documents, but I feel some more attention can be given to the integration of this feature. More control over how rulers relate to one another and their assigned paragraphs would be helpful, along with a dialogue box that allows for complete control all the rulers from one area.

Of course, there's also the distinct possibility that these features are already there, and I'm just doing something incorrectly. It seems I can't write an edition of This Nisus Files without having a dozen readers inform me of a better way to perform certain tasks. Keep them coming, everyone. I appreciate them all.

It's odd, really. I started writing The Nisus Files to focus on converting from MicroSoft Word. I'm now about eight months into the project, and I've almost forgotten how Word works (when it did work, I mean). Both have their positives and negatives, so, for my next column, and I'd like to solicit some help. As I work on my next novel, I'm asking my readers and fellow Nisus users to offer a suggestion or two users should take into account before beginning a new project. I don't need (or want) and entire tutorial, of course, just a tip or suggestion I can explore on my own. I'll be focusing on headers/footers and the difference between document margins and the text wrap area, and I'll also be sure to also relay your suggestions to readers of this column.

In fact, I may also relay them to readers of other columns, as well. Think Charles, John and the others will mind if I hack their columns? Hmm...

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