The Nisus Files: Headers and Footers

By Kirk Hiner

February 10, 2002

What I don't understand sometimes are grand opening celebrations for stores. They recently opened a Giant Eagle near my apartment, and I shopped there at least twice before they celebrated their grand opening. I guess it's like Broadway plays, where they perform the show for a couple months before they consider it opening night. However, with opening nights, you're guaranteed only one. Grand openings can sometimes last months.

It's for this reason I've dropped the "Converting to the Nisus Writer word processor" tag line to this article. It's been a while now, and the process is complete. I'm converted. That's not to say I'm done with the articles, however. I still have plenty to learn, plenty to praise, and plenty about which to complain. Apparently, so do others. I received quite a bit of e-mail from my last article, asking me to address certain issues and make stronger comparisons between Nisus Writer and Word.

Nisus Writer is a diverse tool that accommodates all types of writings. I make this claim based on feedback I've received, not from personal experience. After all, I'm using Nisus to write a novel, so my formatting needs are quite basic. Although Nisus does have HTML tools, I'll stick with BBEdit for that. Nisus could probably handle my page layout needs as well, but I have Quark XPress. Got that handled. And then there's this:

I'd no sooner know what to do with those Nisus Writer buttons than I would the controls of an SR-71. No, I'll stick with what I know...something like headers and footers.

Oh, and the comparisons. I'm not sure if this is fair anymore. I have Word 98, but Microsoft has now released Word X, which I haven't tried. What's more, I'll never have to if Nisus Software hurries up and gets an OS X native version of Nisus Writer out the door. I see, though, that Word X now has non-contiguous text selection capabilities, although they call it "multi-selection." Nisus Writer, of course, has had this feature for years, but hey! At least Microsoft made it easier to spell. I wonder if Microsoft has also followed in Nisus' footsteps and done away with the manual?

Fair or not, let's go back to Word 98 for a moment. Although it certainly had its strengths, working with headers/footers wasn't one of them. They were hard to set up, hard to control, and hard to see. They're only visible in Page Layout Mode, which I suppose makes sense. Yet, for some reason, they're dimmed. Headers and footers are just as much a part of the printed page as the actual text, so I don't understand this decision.

Of course, that complaint's somewhat superficial. More important is the confused interface for setting them up. To insert headers and footers, you'd think you should look under the Insert menu, right? No. Footnotes are there to confuse the issue further, but we all know they're not the same thing. Headers and footers are located under the View menu. Not Edit, not Insert (as with Nisus Writer), but View. Okay, whatever. Once you get in there, things don't get any better. As is usually the case with Microsoft products, what should be a simple menu becomes a jumbled mess of features no one will ever use. Does anyone actually put letter salutations in the footer of text document? Why is that there?

From there, it's mainly a matter of typing and formatting. Word isn't smart enough to default to the typeface used throughout the document, Nisus Writer is. If you're writing in French Script (I would assume because you really don't want anyone to read it), Nisus will make the assumption that you want your headers/footers in the same typeface. This is easy enough to change, as it is with Word, actually, but Nisus, by working with you instead of against you, makes it so you don't have to worry about it. It does, however, default to a center alignment. I don't like that, but I suppose it's a matter of personal taste...and use. And hey, remember those Paragraph Rulers about which I talked back in entry five? They work here as well.

In Word, accessing the Header and Footer menu dims the page and pulls up a floating toolbar of options (see graphic above). The header and footer areas themselves are circled by dotted lines, the area determined by the Document Layout specifications. Nisus, on the other hand, leaves all your options in the actual menu bar (there are already enough floating toolbars in Nisus, thank you very much), but it hides the entire page. I would prefer to have this left open so I ccould gauge the distance between the header and the text, for example. That, and I don't care how many times I've seen it happen; when I've been working on quite a few pages without saving and they all disappear when I go to look at my header...it's like reaching for your wallet only to find it gone, then a second later remembering you moved it to your front pocket. No one needs that quarter second of heartache.

Nisus compensates for this by the ease with which you adjust the space between the header or footer and the page text. Rather than mess around with defining inches as with Word, in Nisus you simply hit a return or two. Done. It's all controlled right there, no need for opening more dialog boxes.

With Word, setting up multiple headers/footers can be quite a chore. It's simple to define a different first page or different odd/even pages, but anything beyond that is quite a pain, messing around with page breaks or section breaks or lunch breaks or something. It's such a chore that I always ended up saving my chapters as individual documents just to avoid the hassle. When it comes to handling headers/footers, Nisus looks at each individual page instead at the entire document. When you first apply a header/footer, it's anchored to the Return. As you add text above the point at which you inserted your header/footer, the header/footer will still begin on the page at which your inserted it. This is quite more "freeform" than that to which I was accustomed, and it took a while to get used to it. I'd sometimes place my cursor in the wrong spot and inadvertently alter the header of the previous page. After a few errors, however, I had it figured out.

The benefit to all of this is that you can have an unlimited number of headers/footers throughout your document. I'm able to keep all the chapters together, yet still keep the first page of each chapter free of headers. When I add or delete large sections of text, I no longer have to edit separate documents to update the page numbers. This more than compensates for the extra work it takes to make sure the headers/footers haven't floated to the wrong page.

This is also where the Nisus method of editing the headers/footers proves to be a tremendous benefit. As I mentioned earlier, Nisus hides the document when you're working with your headers/footers. However, it shows all the headers/footers you currently have within the document. This makes it tremendously simple to make formatting changes across the entire document even with multiple headers/footers. You can simply copy and paste if you choose, for example. No scrolling required.

It's another illustration of what Nisus Writer is all about, which is simply to let the user get some work done. Again, I had to retrain myself on the way these things should work, but I've more than made up for it by not having to muck around with Word's menus and rigid methods.

Oh, and hey. Remember that complaint I had a while back about the menus opening slowly and the type seeming sluggish? Well, it's magically healed itself. I'm not sure what did it yet, but I have my suspicions. I went through Conflict Catcher and disabled a good number of control panels and extensions to prevent Photoshop from crashing each time I saved a file. Along with fixing that problem, it also solved the Nisus sluggishness issue. I'm guessing it may have been one of those Action Utilities, but I'll withhold judgment until I have time to actually go back in and check.

Right now, however, I'm off to the Giant Eagle for some supper. I have to take advantage of their grand opening sale, and I think I only have about five or six months left.

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