Ranulph Glanville wrote:
Nisus allows commenting
Nisus is great in many ways but I paid for the upgrade to 6.5 (pre OS X)
just before paying for the OS X version, then before I knew it I was
paying for v2, then we got a bifurcation to Nisus Writer Pro and
Express, with a steep upgrade price (actually, checking, it seems to be
cheaper now than it was a couple of years when I gave up again).
I think there is a bigger problem here: WPs rely on WYSIWYG processes
(choosing fonts, styles etc) that have no easy way to organise. You try
to find ways that make sense but eventualyl you break down to a
situation where you 'just have to know the programme'. Then they change
them with different versions... Thus going to the new version of Word
(2011), I looked everywhere for the zoom (formerly a percentage value at
the top) and eventualyl saw a slider at the bottom. A slider is hopeless
for fine-tuning. That's an example: when you add features, how do you do
so? Bloat is inherent to WPs, if you ask me. Then you have to have a
file format that allows for a) recovery from corruption b) transparent
reading.
There are roughly two alternatives that *work*, which are based on
readable formats (ie mark-up languages).
1) LaTeX
2) HTML/XML variants
These rely on an expert user who can cope with mark-up language. When
something goes wrong with LaTeX, it's because you have configured it
wrong (whereas Word will 'guess' wrong a lot of the time, it's inherent
to something that relies on hidden values such as 'what is the default
font and style when I type *here*)
HTML got buggered up by Internet Explorer being non-standard but
hopefully that era is behind us now as MS finally have web browsers
installed that *actually read the file formatting in the way it was
intended*.
To my mind, it's like manual vs automatic cars (where manual allows for
more efficiency and control and 'real drivers' wouldn't be seen dead in
an automatic), with the difference that the illusory 'ease of use' has
won the argument for most people. I think that's the shame and it was MS
who took us there. They could have taught users to respect what they
were doing, as it were.
So we are doomed to a suite of WPs that struggle to organise endless
palettes, views, styles etc etc into a coherent way that ultimately
relies on the user getting familiar with it. If they are simple, they
cannot be powerful, if they are powerful, they cannot be intuitive
(unless 'intuitive' is taken to mean 'what I have been doing for ten
years and coping with').
But if you care about your documents, you won't be using Word. You
probably won't be using a WP at all...
My dream -- apps drawing on a LaTeX typesetting engine to render text.
Currently, probably requires too much CPU to render on the fly:(
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