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From: pv9y@vax5.cit.cornell.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Just My Opinion:  MS Word 4.0 vs. Nisus
Message-ID: <1991Apr11.161520.3990@vax5.cit.cornell.edu>
Date: 11 Apr 91 16:15:19 EDT
References: <4329@ryn.mro4.dec.com>
Distribution: na,comp
Organization: CIT, Cornell University
Lines: 59

In article <4329@ryn.mro4.dec.com>,
long@mcntsh.enet.dec.com (Rich Long) writes: 
> 
> In article <17133@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>, dave@PRC.Unisys.COM (David Lee Matuszek) writes...
>>[about Word and Nisus]
> 
>  To his comments let me add that I have tried the Nisus demo, and like it (but
>  WHY didn't they include the help file?). My beefs are:

To add more comments on still :-)

> 
>  o	RAM based. Uh-uh. Nope. Makes it darn hard to read LARGE files. Qued
>  has the same problem.

I see this as a feature. Nisus is fast to do things because everything
is in RAM. Just yesterday I opened 53 files (over 1M of text) in Nisus
under the Finder so it could use all of my 8 MB of RAM. It was fast
and easy and only slightly slower than working with the two or three
files I usually have open. Not to mention then I could search for
anything in all open files instantaneously. To compare, I opened an
800K document in Word today and tried to save as TEXT. It must have
taken 5 minutes at least, if not longer. I'll take the speed any day,
although if you've got a decent amount of memory there should be no
problem with large files or lots of them.


>  o	No tables. I use this Word feature ALL the time. I want this
>  integrated, not some random add-on program.

Tables are pretty snazzy alright, though I find Word's implementation
clumsy. I'll bet that Nisus 4.0 will sport a super-cool table feature.
Comments from Jon Matousek on this?

> Richard C. Long | long@mcntsh.enet.dec.com            | Selfware: If you like

My opinion is that things like the GREP search and replace, powerful
macros (and who cares if they're a little slow in comparison to
AutoMac - they do so much more) and a programming language,
non-contiguous selection, character-based styles (much more powerful
than paragraph-based styles), and multiple user-defined command keys
(so I have Page Setup mapped to Command-P-S, far easier to remember
than Control-Option-F14 or whatever you could make it in any other
macro program) make Nisus the word processor of choice for people who
**really** work with text. And those 53 files I was talking about?
Those were the text files for each issue of TidBITS released so far, a
total of over 900,000 characters and almost 400 pages in the last
year. All of that was written and edited in Nisus. Check out
TidBITS#54 in comp.sys.mac.digest for other stats on the last year of
TidBITS along with information from our survey.

cheers ... -Adam

-- 
Adam C. Engst            (best)  ace@tidbits.tcnet.ithaca.ny.us
                         (also)  ace@tidbits.uucp
       	    (if all else fails)  pv9y@vax5.cit.cornell.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------          
Editor of TidBITS, the weekly electronic Macintosh news journal