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From: owen@raven.phys.washington.edu (Russell Owen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Nisus v. MS Word -- Different Question
Message-ID: <1991Apr24.010713.3696@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 24 Apr 91 01:07:13 GMT
References: <1991Apr14.220122.8800@news.stolaf.edu>
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smithc@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (Christopher Smith) asked about Nisus
vs. Word...

I suggest you buy the NISUS demo, and answer your questions for yourself.
However, here's a few answers, and some general comments.

>        *  does it support a table format like MS Word does
No, but does graphics, so I suppose you can fake it
>        *  does it have footnoting features
Yes
>        *  is Nisus relatively fast, specifically with the spell-
>           checking, searching, and search/replace?
Basic interface is OK on 68030 machines, but unusably slow on a Mac Plus. I
suspect an "SE" or "classic" would also be painful. Search and replace and
spell checking seem  fine to me, but I've not timed them compared to Word.
Nisus' spell-checking suggests alternate spellings so quickly it's almost
instantaneous, making Word's suggest look sick.

Nisus is fine for most stuff, and better for basic stuff because of multiple
undo, MUCH better search and replace, and macros. However, it is missing
hierarchical styles, outlining (except via macros), and keeps the whole file in
RAM (limiting the size of the file you can work on to the partition you assign
to Nisus). Word is more widely-used, and does tables and crude equations.
Neither is very good for references or indexes (if you know of a program that
is, please tell me!).

Until Nisus 3 and Word 4 I would have said Paragon writes much more software
than Microsoft, but now I'm not so sure. Word crashes occasionally, of course,
but so does Nisus 3.05.

-- Russell
owen@raven.phys.washington.edu