Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cucstud!tfd!uupsi!cmcl2!esquire!esquire.dpw.com From: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps Subject: Re: 2 Nisus Questions Message-ID: <2897@esquire.dpw.com> Date: 5 Dec 90 18:39:33 GMT References: <2850@esquire.dpw.com> <3125@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk> Sender: news@DPW.COM Reply-To: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten) Distribution: comp Organization: Davis Polk & Wardwell Lines: 40 In-reply-to: jeremyr@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Jeremy Roussak) In article <3125@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk>, jeremyr@cs (Jeremy Roussak) writes: >I must confess that this was one of the things that irritated me about Nisus >when I reviewed it recently for a British magazine. There are, IMHO, too >many things in Nisus which have been left to macros, widow and orphan >control being just one. Yes, though it also has its benefits. You get greater flexibility, for one, and it allows you to change your mind about something like "Smart Quotes" without penalty (i.e., you could type your document in regular quotes and then change your mind and convert them all to typesetter quotes with one menu selection). I have a macro that does general cleanup of a document (search and replace multiple spaces at the end of a sentence for one space, hyphenate everything, run the Widow/Orphan Control macro, change errant "--" sequences into em-dashes, etc.); all I have to do is remember to run it when I'm ready to print. > Of course you can write wonderful macros which >do lots of nice formatting things (such as smart quotes), but if you >have to reformat a document before it's printed you start to drift away >from WYSIWYG. I found myself writing a Print macro to do all this and then >being (often pleasantly) surpised at the way my printed document looked. I particularly like the supplied macro that turns your "fi", "ff", etc., sequences into ligatures, then prints the document, then turns them all back again. This is great, since you generally don't type in ligatures (at least I don't), and they give the spell-checker no end of headaches. >Come back nroff, all is forgiven :-) Heck, I'm still writing man pages in it... but I'd sure prefer to use Nisus at work. Too bad they don't have a Sun port... :-) -- Steve Baumgarten | "New York... when civilization falls apart, Davis Polk & Wardwell | remember, we were way ahead of you." baumgart@esquire.dpw.com | cmcl2!esquire!baumgart | - David Letterman