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Microsoft Word for Mac. Word for Mac is now available. It’s not a free word processor for Mac users, of course, but it’s worth mentioning. So, if you do happen to be an MS Word lover, you can subscribe to Office 365 for a low monthly fee of $9.99 month. Reviewers are raving that MS Word for Mac looks and acts like MS Word for the PC. Nisus Writer Pro is a powerful multilingual word processor, similar to its entry level products, but brings new features such as table of contents, indexing, bookmarks, widow and orphan control, cross references, line numbering, and text wrap around images.
- Nisus Writer Pro Is A Great Alternative To Word For Machine
- Nisus Writer Pro Is A Great Alternative To Word For Mac Pro
- Nisus Writer Pro Vs Microsoft Word
- Nisus Writer Pro Is A Great Alternative To Word For Mac Free
Nisus Software recently released Nisus Writer Pro 2.0, a major revision to the company’s legendary high-end word processor. It had been more than a year since its last update, but the new version includes a vast number of improvements that more than justify the delay. In fact, it goes quite a bit beyond that. After following Nisus Writer’s ups and downs carefully these many years, I am equally shocked and delighted to say this is the first version of the application since Mac OS X was released — over ten years ago — that I can seriously contemplate using for my own professional writing.
The release notes make for extremely interesting reading. They detail over 500 changes, including major new features, minor alterations, and bug fixes. Among the headliner features of this release are several capabilities I’ve been wanting eagerly for years — change tracking, paragraph borders and shading, and drawing tools. Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 can also create PDF files with proper tables of contents and clickable links to internal references, export documents in EPUB format, add watermarks behind page contents, display a vertical ruler, show a customizable menu palette of special characters, and link to image files stored on disk.
Of course, Nisus Writer Pro retains such trademark features as multiple, editable clipboards; extensive support for multilingual text, especially in right-to-left languages; the world’s best find-and-replace capability; a built-in macro language; a glossary feature for automatic text substitutions; a first-rate table editor; multiple columns, sections, and other layout features; heavily customizable autonumbering, bookmarking, cross-referencing, indexing, and tables of contents; footnotes and endnotes; user-defined paragraph, character, list, and note styles; and a tremendously adaptable user interface, with such niceties as custom mnemonic multi-key shortcuts (such as Command-S-A-P for “Save as PDF”). And let’s not forget thatNisus pioneered features that are now nearly universal, such as noncontiguous selection (now called “multipart” selection) and unlimited undo and redo.
Before I go on, I should acknowledge that if your word-processing needs extend no further than the occasional business letter or shopping list, Nisus Writer Pro may not interest you much. This is a serious tool for people with heavy-duty writing needs — those writing books, dissertations, academic papers, legal documents, and other complex works are most likely to benefit from what Nisus Writer Pro can do best: manipulate text, in almost any way you can imagine. Need to go through a 950-page alumni directory and change every entry in the form “John Smith, Class of ’72” to “1972 [tab] SMITH, John,” with the year spelled out, the last name in uppercase, and the first name in italics? Nisus Writer Pro can doit in seconds. That sort of power is what sets Nisus Writer Pro apart from every other word processor.
I’ve been spending a great deal of time with the new Nisus Writer Pro, and in just a bit I’ll tell you all about it — the new, the old, the good, the bad. Because of my personal history with Nisus (the product and the company), I need to wrap this review in a bit of a story, which I’m sure will come as a surprise to no one. Those who have no patience for such things should feel free to skip ahead to the appropriate heading (“New in Two”). But let me do you the favor of summarizing my findings here at the outset: Wow — Nisus isback, baby! I’m geeking out over this software in a way I haven’t done since my earliest days as a Mac user. It isn’t quite everything I need it to be yet, but it’s finally within striking distance — by which I mean, close enough that I can make up for nearly all its deficiencies by way of a few carefully crafted macros. For someone who spends all day, every day, in a word processor and whose feelings about Microsoft Word are unprintable, this is huge. Those of you who traffic in text: go download this software right now. I mean it.
A Little Background — Many TidBITS readers have known me since way back, and have heard this before, but the story is worth repeating. Back in grad school when I was studying linguistics, I was a PC user. But I sometimes used the Macs in the university’s computer lab, and when I mentioned to my adviser that I’d be using Word to write my thesis, he grimaced and said I should really look into Nisus (as it was called then) instead. I ordered a free demo copy, loaded the floppies on a Mac in the computer lab, and within minutes my fate — I mean literally, my entire career — was sealed. I was so overwhelmed with the capabilities of this program, which was far superiorto anything available for Windows, that I decided right there and then to become a Nisus customer, which in turn meant that I’d be buying my first Mac shortly thereafter. (By the way, if you want an interesting historical perspective about the “good old days” of Nisus, consult Matt Neuburg’s massive 1992 review of Nisus 3.0, comprising 14 “articles” spread out over three weekly issues of TidBITS.)
In those days, Nisus was best known for its extensive multilingual support — this was before Unicode, when Macs needed considerable help to write in languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, and Japanese. Most of my own writing, even then, was in English, but I did have to write long, complex academic documents. I found that getting my work done in Nisus was far easier than in Word, and quite a few tasks that required no more than a couple of clicks or keystrokes in Nisus were impossible to do in Word at all. Nisus was not only an exceptionally powerful word processor, it was endlessly customizable — if I needed to do anything that didn’t have a built-in command, I’d simply whip up a macro to add that feature myself. Sure, thesoftware had its limitations, but it was far and away the best tool available.
Over the next few years, I lived in a number of places and did a number of things unrelated to linguistics or academia, but somehow I remained in Nisus’s gravitational pull. (I won’t get into the details here; buy me a beer at Macworld if you want to hear the whole thing.) Shortly after moving to San Diego in 1994, I managed to get a part-time job at Nisus Software — at first, helping to index the manual, then doing tech support — and eventually became the product manager for Nisus Writer. While I was working at the company, I also managed to land my first book deal — for “The Nisus Way,” a 600-page tome that was published at the end of 1995. Although my writing career was, shall we say,noncontiguous, it was Nisus that started the whole thing. It led me not only to the Mac but to TidBITS, and to Adam and Tonya (who were big proponents of Nisus Writer, and who for many years used Nisus Writer to produce TidBITS), and ultimately to my current habit of writing Take Control books and Macworld articles at a somewhat ridiculous pace.
Writing books in Nisus Writer was a joy. I never wasted time with tedious, repetitive activities, because everything I wanted to do could be heavily automated — and controlled from the keyboard. The software let me work at my top speed, without getting in my way or frustrating me. Although I’ve written many books in Word, I’ve never enjoyed the process. For serious writing, especially when it’s technical in nature, Word is a minimally adequate tool, the same way a Coke bottle is a minimally adequate tool for pounding nails. (In both cases, the tool also has an annoying tendency to break in the process!) Nisus Writer was a perfectly balanced hammer — exactly the right tool for the job.
Throughout various jobs and projects, I pretty much lived and breathed Nisus Writer for years. When an editor or colleague expected to receive a manuscript from me in Word format, I didn’t sweat it; I just did a Save As and no one ever knew the difference. But gradually, expectations changed. By the late 1990s, nearly everyone I worked with used Word’s change tracking, comments, and user-defined styles extensively, so exchanging documents with them meant ensuring that all those attributes came through perfectly on both sides. Nisus Writer couldn’t do that, so I reluctantly started using Word for the bulk of my word processing, though still relying on Nisus Writer when I could.
And then Mac OS X came along in 2001. Nisus Writer ran only in Classic mode, and not spectacularly even there. Nisus Software didn’t release a Mac OS X-compatible word processor until 2003, and that was Nisus Writer Express, a completely rewritten application that had but a tiny subset of the features of Nisus Writer Classic. It didn’t even come close to meeting my needs, and I was left without any word processor that had the majority of the features I’d come to depend on just a few years earlier. Never mind the faster hardware and the advanced operating system; my Mac had become far less powerful at performing the tasks most important to me.
I wasn’t the only one missing the capabilities of the old Nisus and dreaming of something even more advanced. In 2004, Adam Engst wrote “WriteRight: The Writer’s Word Processor” (17 May 2004), in which he lamented the lack of a serious word processor for professional writers, and imagined what an ideal tool would look like if it existed. (Spoiler alert: It looks very much like Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.)
Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, every time Nisus Software announced an update, I excitedly checked the release notes to see if the software had gained the features I needed. Time after time, my hopes were dashed. Nisus Writer Pro 1.0, released to considerable fanfare in 2007, certainly made major strides in the right direction, and by the time version 1.4.1 came out in 2010, the software had regained perhaps 80 percent of the features I’d left behind in Nisus Writer Classic. Unfortunately, that remaining 20 percent was pretty important — and besides, my list had grown. For example, during the dark years in which Take Control relied on Word for creating ebooks (we’ve since transitioned to Pages), we becamedependent on styles that included paragraph borders and shading, features that had never appeared in any version of Nisus Writer. Even though the application did finally add Word-compatible comments, my needs were growing at a faster pace than Nisus Writer Pro’s development.
I often reflected, as I disappointedly tried out each new version of Nisus Writer, that Adam’s complaint still held — like other word processors, Nisus Writer simply wasn’t designed for professional writers who work collaboratively with editors and publishers in the real world. It seemed to be a capable enough tool for creating documents that never had to be shared in an editable form, but that’s an increasingly rare mode of word processing.
New in Two — And then came version 2.0. I was prepared for yet another disappointment, but when I started reading the release notes, my jaw dropped. It looked like someone at Nisus Software had been reading my mind. On paper, at least, the added (or restored) features appeared to meet every need on my list, including some obscure features we use lots in the Take Control world but hadn’t talked much about publicly. Could this be it? Had Nisus Writer Pro finally caught up with me? With a mixture of enthusiasm and dread I downloaded the new version and started testing.
Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 feels to me like the first version of the program that could be considered a proper Mac OS X-native heir to Nisus Writer Classic (versions 4 through 6.5, circa 1994–2001). Not only have most of the old features been restored, many have been reimagined — implemented in superior and often clever ways. At the same time, the program has picked up all the capabilities a modern Cocoa word processor should have.
Change tracking is probably the most important new feature. For anyone who works on documents in a team, or even with a single editor, being able to tell who modified what, in which phase of a document’s evolution, is imperative. As in Word, when change tracking is turned on, deleted text appears in a bubble alongside the main document, while newly added text is highlighted in a different color; each change is also marked with the name of the person who made it. Changes can be individually reviewed, accepted, or rejected in any of several ways, and changes of various sorts can be selectively hidden or displayed. It’s not identical to the way other applications handle the process, but it’s sensible and well-designed.
Paragraph borders and shading are also new, but seem to be off to a shakier start. I found and reported numerous anomalies in the way borders and shading are displayed (not to mention the ways they’re imported and exported, as I discuss ahead). Sometimes a portion of a border would blink on and off, or would appear or disappear when I clicked in an adjacent paragraph. If a paragraph is indented from the margins and has background shading, that shading sometimes doesn’t extend to the margins unless you also apply a border; in this and several other ways, the interactions between borders and shading are somewhat unpredictable. And if you apply a hairline border (that is, 1/4 point), it appears thicker on screen than a 1/2 pointborder, even when zoomed in to 300 percent. With significant fiddling, I was able to replicate most of the borders and shading we use in Take Control books, but this pair of features appears not to have been tested thoroughly and still needs some refinement.
You can now add a watermark to a document — that is, an image or text that appears behind or in front of the text on some or all pages — and that seems to work just fine, although I can’t say it’s something I’ve needed to do more than once or twice in my entire life.
Nisus Writer Pro Is A Great Alternative To Word For Machine
On the other hand, the newly added drawing tools are quite nice. You can now add lines, arrows, shapes, callouts, and text boxes. Nisus Writer Pro offers elaborate control over these objects’ size, shape, stroke and fill colors, rotation, opacity, text wrap, alignment, grouping, and numerous other characteristics. I frequently need to include arrows, callouts, and the like in my documents, and I am impressed by the thoroughness and care with which these drawing tools have been implemented. My only complaint is that while you can apply attributes such as borders and shadows to imported graphics just as you can to shapes you’ve drawn, those options are available only for floating graphics, not inline graphics. (We often need to applyborders to inline graphics in Take Control books, and it’s no problem to do so in Word or Pages.)
Ins and Outs — Compatibility with Word remains a priority for much of my writing, and in this respect Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 is a curiously mixed bag. Nisus Writer Pro uses RTF as its native file format — a smart choice, given its near universality and the fact that programs like Word and Pages can save or export files in RTF format. But the question for those who have to exchange files with Word users is whether a Word document can make a round-trip to Nisus Writer Pro intact — with or without using RTF as an intermediate format. The answer, as I can definitively say after considerable testing, is: sorta.
Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 includes two entirely different translators for importing Word (.doc or .docx) and OpenOffice.org (.odf) documents; you can choose which one to use for each file type in the Advanced pane of the Preferences window. If you choose “Mac OS X (faster),” files open almost instantly but lose so much of their formatting as to be nearly useless. If you choose “OpenOffice.org (more complete),” it may take several seconds longer to import a file, but considerably more of the formatting survives.
To test translation fidelity, I used Take Control manuscripts in Word (.doc) and Pages formats and opened them in Nisus Writer Pro every which way I could. I tried saving (in Word) and exporting (in Pages) as RTF and opening those files directly; I tried opening the Word files directly, using each of the translators; I tried exporting from Pages to .doc and saving from Word to .docx.
Files saved in RTF format came through fairly well because Nisus Writer Pro required no import translator to open them. But paragraph borders and shading were off to one extent or another, most bookmarks were lost, and internal links didn’t work at all. Outcomes weren’t as good when importing Word files. With the “Mac OS X” translators, the results were truly awful; the formatting was hideous, user-defined styles were gone, and in some cases hyperlinks were turned into useless raw codes in the text. The “OpenOffice.org” translators were much better, though still far from perfect. The user-defined styles came through, more or less, and most of the formatting was pretty close, but paragraph borders and shading weresignificantly off. Bookmarks and internal links were, again, either missing or broken. And, in the translated Word files, certain special characters such as curly quotes and em dashes were replaced, at seemingly random intervals, with garbage characters.
In fairness, these are all things I could fix with a macro, but that shouldn’t be necessary; the translators need improvement. Nisus Software acknowledged file-translation issues, but pointed out that since the company relies on third-party translation code, fixes are challenging at best. Be that as it may, I can see no argument for including the “Mac OS X” translators; the one-time savings of a few seconds in no way makes up for the terrible file translation. Nisus Writer Pro would be better off eliminating the preference and sticking exclusively with the better, if marginally slower, option.
To find out what would happen if I chose to work with a Word file in Nisus Writer Pro and then send it back to a colleague, I re-saved the files in Nisus Writer, and opened them again in Word. I was pleasantly surprised to see that comments and change tracking survived the round trip. Still, something was always off — a style wrong here, a border misaligned there. I imagine that for fairly simple documents without elaborate styles, the process could be seamless enough that an editor or publisher might not realize the file had been altered by another program. But for something of the complexity of Take Control books, translating into and out of Word format would be a non-starter.
Supposing we were to use Nisus Writer Pro from start to finish for Take Control books (thus sidestepping the whole file-translation issue), we’d be most interested in how well it creates PDF and EPUB documents. I’m delighted to say that PDF output was the best I’ve ever seen from a Mac application. Bookmarks came through correctly, as advertised; internal and external links worked as they should; everything looked exactly the same in the PDF as it did in Nisus Writer. Although nearly any Mac application can create PDFs, we’ve had serious problems with PDFs produced by Word and even Pages, and seeing such fine output from Nisus Writer Pro warmed my heart.
EPUB output was less impressive. It wasn’t terrible; the books are certainly readable, but the styling was iffy. In particular, to repeat a common theme, paragraph borders and shading rarely came through correctly, as they do when creating EPUBs from Pages. In addition, all the links to internal bookmarks were broken. It’s not terribly difficult to fix these things after the fact by editing an EPUB’s constituent XHTML and CSS files — for example, to repair the broken links, I simply replaced every instance of “%23” with “#” — but even though I could automate this sort of thing with macros, it’s a hassle that I’d just as soon avoid. I hope Nisus Software can improve EPUB output considerably. (And indeed, arepresentative from Nisus Software told me the bug regarding internal links in EPUBs will be fixed in version 2.0.1.)
Missing in Action — File translation issues notwithstanding, Nisus Writer Pro has come a long way, and is indeed now tantalizingly close to being the word processor of my dreams. But it still has some other irritating shortcomings that I’d love to see addressed in the near future.
Although Nisus Writer Pro offers draft, page preview, and full-screen modes, all these share in common the limitation that a document can appear only as a continuous vertical scroll. You can’t split the screen to show different parts of a document at once, as you could in Nisus Writer Classic (and still can in Word, BBEdit, and many other applications). You can’t show two or more pages side-by-side, or even display page thumbnails. In short, you’re limited to seeing a single portion of your document that’s no taller than your screen. You can zoom in and out, but if you want to maintain readability and still see more than a single page of your document at once, you’re out of luck. I find this tremendously limiting, as I’mused to seeing as many as six full pages of a Word document on my 27-inch display and easily comparing text in two parts of a document without jumping back and forth. If I could change just one thing in Nisus Writer, adding more (and more-flexible) view options would be it.
Despite having unlimited undo and redo, Nisus Writer Pro still lacks one of my favorite and most frequently used Word commands: Repeat, which reapplies whatever command you performed last. Another Word feature I miss is single-click line selection (move the pointer into the left margin so it turns into a right-pointing arrow, and then click — no dragging required — to select an entire line). And although Nisus Writer’s paragraph styling features are quite thorough, they strangely omit a “page break before” attribute, which we use, for example, on all chapter headings in Take Control books. Sure, we can stick in manual page breaks, but being able to build that into a style is much more convenient.
Another thing both Adam and I noticed almost immediately was the absence of syntax coloring. When I need to edit code of any sort — Markdown, HTML, XML, PHP, Perl, or whatever — I immediately reach for a dedicated text editor such as BBEdit, which can automatically color-code tags, comments, variables, and other code elements to make the text more readable. It’s entirely fair that Nisus Writer’s developers don’t want to delve into all the sorts of features users expect in a text editor designed for programming. But TidBITS, Macworld, and many blogging platforms rely on John Gruber’s Markdown syntax for styling plain text using simple tags, and since so much of mywriting uses Markdown, I have to choose between using Nisus Writer Pro and having those visual cues I’ve come to rely on. For that matter, syntax coloring would be quite useful when working in Nisus Writer’s own macro language, which after all can include blocks of Perl and AppleScript. (Sure, one could use a macro to apply static syntax coloring after the fact, but that helps little when actively writing — what’s needed is coloring that changes dynamically as you type.)
Speaking of macros, Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 is far beyond Nisus Writer Classic in its automation capabilities, and the flexibility to add entirely new features by writing macros is invaluable. Even so, the macro language as it exists today is a weird hodgepodge of several inconsistent “dialects” that frequently require jumping through a series of counterintuitive hoops to do ordinary things. For example, a macro can tell you the name of the font at the insertion point, but it took me an hour of experimenting and poring over the inscrutable Macro Language Reference to figure out the roundabout sequence of steps necessary to achieve such a trivial thing. Another example: If you want to resize a window in Nisus Writer Pro using a macro,you can — but only by embedding a snippet of AppleScript with the necessary command, as it’s not part of Nisus Writer’s own macro language.
The problem isn’t merely that the documentation is unhelpful; the macro language itself lacks cohesion and completeness. Experienced programmers will be frustrated to find that so many things act almost, but not quite, as they would in other languages; that “objects” don’t mean what one expects; that obvious features are missing; and that a macro’s left hand doesn’t seem to know what its right hand is doing. On the other hand, beginners will probably not get much beyond the simple Menu Command Dialect, because the language itself, and the reference material for using it, are simply too opaque. This is all a great pity, because macros are in fact enormously powerful, and with a bit of spit and polish, the macro language andits documentation could be made vastly more accessible to ordinary users.
In the “so near and yet so far” category, a few other items are worth mentioning:
- Having multiple, editable clipboards is nice, but you have to remember what you put on which clipboard, and be careful not to overwrite something you want to save. A more interesting and useful approach, offered by numerous third-party utilities such as PTHPasteboard Pro, is to automatically save a clipboard history going back as far as you need. (Nisus Writer Pro does include a set of macros to rotate among four clipboards, but this is a clunky, manual, and partial solution.)
- You can define a string of text as a bookmark, and elsewhere in your document, insert a cross-reference to that bookmark such that if the original text changes, the cross-reference does too. This is a neat trick that I used all the time in Nisus Writer Classic, but as it’s currently implemented, the cross-reference won’t update correctly if you change the first or last character of the bookmarked text. The manual explains a complicated workaround, but the problem didn’t exist in 1994 and could certainly be avoided today, too. This is an example of something we’ve seen often when writing Take Control books: if you have trouble documenting something, the feature itself may be poorly designed. (I should point out thatcross-references of other sorts — for example, to page or figure numbers — do update correctly when the source changes; only cross-references to the bookmark text itself are problematic.)
- The interface for defining character, paragraph, list, and note styles is unquestionably better than Word’s, which piles layer upon layer of modal dialogs. And yet, in Nisus Writer Pro, you can’t see your style definitions at the same time as your document, and the interface for removing style characteristics is completely different from that for adding or editing them. It’s needlessly confusing, and I think more attention should be paid to usability.
- Along similar lines, a number of icons and other user interface elements could use a designer’s touch. Consider the statusbar at the bottom of the window. The three leftmost blobs represent the currently selected text’s background color, highlight color, and font color. Can you guess which is which? Me neither. And those icons for list style, character style, and paragraph style, because they’re so small, look very fuzzy due to antialiasing. These things could easily be remedied (see my non-artist’s rendition, beneath the current version, for just one possible approach), and they’d make the program so much more inviting. (According to Nisus Software, these icons will be improved in version 2.0.1.)
- A paragraph’s ruler — that is, the settings describing its overall shape, including indents, tab stops, alignment, and spacing — can be displayed, copied, pasted, dragged, and dropped. It’s sometimes useful to work with these characteristics independently of paragraph styles, but it would be more useful still if you could name rulers as was possible in Nisus Writer Classic, and if dragging a ruler to another paragraph didn’t insert the letter “a” along with the ruler (a clear bug, which Nisus Software says will be fixed in the next update).
- Outlining in Nisus Writer Pro is unusual. If you assign heading styles to paragraphs, they appear automatically in the Table of Contents Navigator, which you can display or hide in a sidebar and which is designed mainly to let you see your document’s overall structure and navigate through it easily. The various headings are indented hierarchically as an outline should be; you can promote and demote headings, collapse and expand them, and drag them to other locations within the Table of Contents Navigator — and the material beneath them moves just as it should. If you assign automatic numbers to the heading styles, these update as you rearrange the outline too. It’s a rather artificial way to work, though, in that you’retyping text in your document but arranging your outline in a separate view, which contains only headings. It’s certainly better than nothing, and serviceable for simple outlining tasks, but nowhere near as capable as Word’s outliner, to say nothing of stand-alone tools such as OmniOutliner.
- The built-in Document Manager, which lets you organize and access your files, strikes me as being almost entirely superfluous. The Finder seems to be perfectly well suited to that task, and in my view this is one of several examples of Nisus Writer Pro putting a lot of effort into solving nonexistent problems.
Final Thoughts — The features (and bugs) I’ve called attention to here are merely the ones that happened to catch my attention in several days of intensive use. Even listing the other features in Nisus Writer Pro would make this review twice as long — it’s a deep, deep program. So when I criticize the program’s shortcomings, it’s only because they stand out so starkly against the backdrop of a thousand brilliant, correctly functioning features. I mention the issues I do because they comprise — finally, after all these years — a relatively tiny delta between what I have and what I need.
Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 checks off almost every requirement for professional, modern word processing Adam imagined in a hypothetical WriteRight program back in 2004, and then some. The things Nisus Writer Pro still lacks are bothersome, but not so bothersome that I can’t use it to get my work done more efficiently than in Word or Pages. Even as I type this review in Nisus Writer Pro, writing macros and tweaking keyboard shortcuts as I go, I’m toying with the possibility of using the application to write an upcoming book. I mean that as high praise — and it also feels like coming home after 15 tedious years of wandering in the wilderness. I’ve been given the opportunity to enjoy the craft of writing again, and I find that deeplymeaningful. I can’t promise you the same experience, of course, but I encourage you to give it a try and find out for yourself.
While the number of improvements Nisus Writer Pro has accumulated in the last year is breathtaking, I’d be happier with slow, steady progress — for example, monthly bug-fix releases and a handful of new features once a quarter. It’s fine to save up major changes for a paid upgrade every two or three years, but in my experience, customers are more content and loyal when they feel their needs are actively being addressed. And, I’d rather get 10 percent of the features I’m still missing in a few months’ time than to get them all — but only after waiting for years.
The reason I became a Nisus user way back when was the same as the reason I switched to, and stuck with, the Mac — it made my life easier, enabling me to get my work done with less grief and fewer distractions. With Nisus Writer Pro 2.0, the software has come almost full circle, and I once again feel that I can both use it and recommend it enthusiastically. Now if it could just move forward that last, tiny little bit, I’d be beside myself with delight. Then the only thing missing would be a proper book about the software. I know a guy who could write it.
Nisus Writer Pro 2.0, a 160 MB download, is a universal binary and costs $79 new, or $99 for a three-license family pack. Upgrades from Nisus Writer Pro 1.x or any version of Nisus Writer Express cost $49, and a 15-day free trial is available. (Nisus Writer Express, which has only a subset of the features in Nisus Writer Pro, remains available at $45, but hasn’t been updated since April 2010.)
In “Vote for Your Favorite Mac Word Processor” (10 July 2017), we asked you to rate the Mac word processors that you’ve used. Over 800 TidBITS readers responded to our survey of 21 apps, submitting close to 4000 votes. We found that Microsoft Word still dominates the landscape for word processors, but our readers wholeheartedly recommend several alternatives.
(And yes, we’re planning to do another survey to collect opinions about Markdown-based text editors like Ulysses and Bear. Such apps are not full-fledged word processors, but they’ve acquired a loyal following among those who don’t need to style text using arbitrary fonts, sizes, and styles, or insert graphics into text.)
To evaluate the results, we calculated the weighted average for each app, assigning a weight of 1 (Avoid it) through 5 (Can’t live without it) for each of the five choices — the best weighted average possible is thus 5. Apps that received only a handful of votes may have skewed weighted averages, of course, so we also counted the raw number of votes each app received.
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft Word received the most votes by far, and equally as unsurprising was that Apple’s Pages tallied the second most votes. However, less anticipated was the fact that the current Pages 6.2 garnered far more votes than the much-missed Pages 4.3, and hit the same weighted ranking. So lamentations that Pages 6.2 pales in comparison to Pages 4.3, while not unfounded, aren’t as widespread as might have been believed.
Although they received far fewer votes than Microsoft Word and Pages, Nisus Writer Pro and Scrivener earned the top ratings from TidBITS readers, likely due to their focus on niche audiences with serious word processing needs. Nevertheless, even though Microsoft Word, the 800-pound gorilla of the word processing world, is often reviled, it didn’t fare too badly in user ratings, outpacing alternatives such as Nisus Writer Express, LibreOffice Writer, and Apache OpenOffice Writer.
Nisus Writer Pro Is A Great Alternative To Word For Mac Pro
Here then is a list of the Mac word processors most liked by TidBITS readers, sorted by rating. We offer a rating graph and commentary for the apps that earned a weighted average greater than Word’s 2.96; for the rest, the research is up to you, since only you know what features are important. Focus on those apps that have free trial versions and strong import capabilities, since you’ll want to get some experience with the app before you commit to it. Plus, because you’re likely to want to use a word processor for years, stick with apps that are receiving regular updates.
Nisus Writer Pro (219 votes, 3.89, $79, 10.8.5+) — Read comments from the previous article.
We were pleased to see Nisus Writer Pro take the rating title because we’ve long appreciated its capabilities when writing and editing Take Control books. Users generally agreed that it offers the power and functionality of Microsoft Word without the complexity.
Jeff Hecht said, “A workhorse, and as a full-time writer my choice for all writing that doesn’t specifically require Microsoft Word details such as equations or certain formatting.”
“I’ve tried all the major word processors, and this is the one for me. It has a nice balance of features and doesn’t use any proprietary file formats,” Mark Solocinski said.
Bob Stern agreed: “Nisus Writer Pro has the power of Microsoft Word with an interface that I find much easier to learn and use. Nisus has a much more powerful and versatile Find-and-Replace than Microsoft Word or any other word processor. You may not think you need this extra power, but you’ll find more and more uses for it.”
Although Tommy Weir concurred about Nisus Writer Pro’s power and interface, he did have some caveats. “Nisus Writer Pro is my favourite word processor. Love the interface, the configurability, styles, find and replace, doc comparison, macros etc. It goes minimal, it goes maximal, it’s great. It is, however, not as good as Pages when it comes to page layout features, embedding images etc. For anything long, I use Nisus Writer Pro; anything short or graphics-heavy, I use Pages.”
But Nisus Writer Pro isn’t for everyone. Karen Hughes wrote, “I find Nisus Writer Pro very capable, but in the end, I tend to fall back to Word or Pages for most things. I find the style system in Nisus Writer Pro a bit more clunky than the alternatives — but I’m keen to support Nisus as an independent company.”
Scrivener (249 votes, 3.69, $45, 10.9+) — Read comments from the previous article.
We debated whether to include Scrivener, since it’s not your typical word processor. Although it has many standard word processing features, Scrivener focuses on helping writers organize notes, characters, and sources. Regardless, many love it for their work. We heard from academics, screenplay writers, and authors.
“I couldn’t write long-form fiction without it. I know, because I’ve tried,” said our own Michael Cohen.
Steve Fassmann particularly appreciates Scrivener’s flexibility. “I love Scrivener because I can use it in so many different ways. I journal, outline and prototype in it. When creating a new major document at work, I usually start in Scrivener before moving to the official system, once I have figured out how the document needs to work.”
Speaking for screenwriters, Tommy Weir said, “I use Scrivener for the first draft of screenplays. How to the raft for mac. The approach it uses is perfect for this. It features flawless export to Final Draft, which is where I do subsequent drafts.”
And Colin Owen spoke up for book authors. “I use Scrivener to write my books. There’s nothing better out there. It has way more stuff than I’ll ever use, but just using it simply is perfect for me,” he said.
Ian summed up opinions surrounding Scrivener well: “Scrivener is the best writers app on any operating system. I’m an academic, and Scrivener works amazingly for us, allowing structured writing and working from reference material in a way no other mix of programs can match. If your layout requirements are not too great, you can use Scrivener stand-alone. But for complex output documents, most Scrivener users will compile their work then top-copy it using layout software. Because it also supports MultiMarkdown, powerful publishing tools like Pandoc become available directly from Scrivener.”
Pages 6.2 (516 votes, 3.40, Free, 10.12+) — Read comments from the previous article.
Given all the complaints we hear about post-4.3 versions of Pages, we were stunned by the popularity and praise surrounding the latest version. Readers praised its power and ease of use, despite it having fewer features than Word and still lacking a few from Pages 4.3.
Tommy Weir, who has used most Mac word processors, summed up many of the comments:
Pages is my everyday word processing tool. Mainly because my daily work involves tasks Pages is really good at.
- A quick letter, or a packing label, or an invoice. I don’t type anything long on it, that typically I do in Nisus Writer Pro.
- Word documents. I find that Pages has the best Word importer so it’s become my default tool for dealing with my colleagues who use PCs.
- Pages is also a dandy page layout tool and its handling of graphics and embedded media is the best on the market. I do a lot of this kind of image heavy documents. Pages makes this easy.
So while it is not my favourite word processor, it is my daily one. I don’t have the ‘oh, I’m immersing myself in words and writing now’ feeling I get with Nisus but I do find myself being very productive with Pages.
Alan Ralph concurred: “Compared to Word, working in Pages is a much more pleasant experience! I regularly use it for producing invoices to send to customers, business letters and other work-related stuff. Best of all, it can quickly spit out a Word doc or PDF for me when I need to.”
Despite its simplicity, Pages is useful for professional work. David said, “I’ve used Pages to write two books, largely because it has the combination of power and simplicity that I like. Word always seems like you have to push through a thick layer of complexity to get to writing. Pages just seems like you can start typing and get into it.”
And Michael Cohen, author of “Take Control of Pages,” said, “Having spent weeks exploring its nooks and crannies, I can truthfully say that Pages is a very capable, surprisingly powerful, and visually attractive app. Most of the features lost in the transition from Pages 4.3 to 5 have now returned. If you gave up on it back then, it’s definitely worth another look.” Of course, Michael is a bit biased, but he is unquestionably the leading expert on Pages outside of Cupertino.
Nisus Writer Pro Vs Microsoft Word
Nonetheless, other readers supported Michael’s claim that Pages has mostly returned to its former glory. Jolin Warren added, “Now that linked text boxes are (finally!) back, we’re almost there. But the way Pages 6.2 deals with styles is still inferior to 4.3, and importantly it can’t import styles from another document. Once importing styles arrives in the ‘new’ Pages, I will banish 4.3 forever, but until then there are medium-length documents where I need to use it, even though the recipient then imports it into 6.2.”
Pages 4.3 (348 votes, 3.40, No Longer for Sale, 10.9+) — Read comments from the previous article.
The venerable Pages 4.3 still has its fans, but it wasn’t as popular as we had expected.
Peter White said “This app is my daily workhorse and has been for what seems to be a very long time. I strongly dislike the way new versions of Pages have turned Inspector into an included sidebar that wastes screen space. It looks like I will be using Pages 4.3 for some time unless an OS upgrade breaks it, and then I will consult the result of this survey for better options.”
Once he’s done writing in Scrivener, Colin Owens drops back to Pages 4.3 as well. He said, “I use Pages 4.3 for all my book layouts. It does facing pages which is essential for me. I don’t use the newer versions at all.”
Mellel (166 votes, 3.32, $39, 10.8+) — Read comments from the previous article.
Coming as it does from a small Israeli company called RedleX, Mellel isn’t as well known in the United States as some of the other word processors in the Mac world, but it’s a mature app that has been gaining features for years. Readers noted that Mellel is particularly good for long and complex documents.
Lisa Spangenberg said, “I use Mellel for a lot of scholarly writing because it supports complex footnotes and multiple languages and writing systems. It handles footnotes more flexibly than Microsoft Word and is better about mixing languages and writing systems than Pages. It also works well with the Bookends bibliographic/reference management app.”
Jolin Warren agreed, saying “Mellel is excellent. I don’t know what I would have done without it when writing long reports. Its support for structured documents and styles makes working with long documents easy and enjoyable. It always puts a smile on my face. Sadly I haven’t had the need to use it lately (no big documents to write), but I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s fast, reliable, well thought-through, and predictable. Loads of great features, too.”
And Miles said, “Mellel makes long documents easy to organize and navigate, and the outline feature is incredibly useful. The whole program is rock solid and a joy to use.”
All that power does require a bit of a learning curve, though, as Michael Lever noted:
I use Mellel regularly when writing reports and when I want a letter to my clients to be particularly accessible, for example using line numbers.
Nisus Writer Pro Is A Great Alternative To Word For Mac Free
Mellel has two features that I wouldn’t be without. Line numbering to the right-hand side which is best when binding pages on the left-hand margin and printing to duplex. And its outliner is excellent.
I am looking forward to Mellel 4 which is promising some great new features, such as indexing.
Mellel takes a lot of getting used to but I find it more reliable than Nisus Writer Pro where, for example, the language in document setup tends to slip. Where I find Mellel not good is for simple letter writing: it has no vertical ruler so it is not easy to see where to start spacing for typing the recipient’s name and address etc.
TextEdit (475 votes, 3.15, Free, 10.12+) — Read comments from the previous article.
We weren’t surprised to see that users overwhelmingly rated Apple’s bundled TextEdit as a solid performer. Nevertheless, users wished that TextEdit had more features.
“TextEdit is OK for bare-bones text entry, but its typographic controls are shamefully inadequate. There’s no good reason for TextEdit to be such a primitive writing tool after all these years,” said Alan Sanders.
Tommy Weir would prefer to see TextEdit focus on plain text instead of rich text: “I wish TextEdit was more of a plain text editor. Given that Pages is now free perhaps Apple would revisit the functionality they’ve built into it. There’s always a need for a bare bones text editor cough and it should ship with the system and load anything.”
TextEdit can be used just for plain text (choose Format > Make Plain Text), but it offer little in terms of tools suited to working with plain-text documents. Weir makes a solid argument: TextEdit is barely functional as a word processor, Pages is now free, and the Mac doesn’t ship with a plain-text editor.
(Josh Centers here. I’ve long had a soft spot for TextEdit, since I used it for multiple essays and articles in college. It was fast, simple, and free! In competitive journalism classes where speed was a factor, I could often have articles written in TextEdit before my classmates were able to load Word!)
Microsoft Word (690 votes, 2.96, 10.10+) — Read comments from the previous article.
The 800-pound gorilla of Mac word processors, Microsoft Word easily earned the most votes, but it is far from the most loved word processor. Reader comments showed grudging respect, but most people seemed to consider Word a necessary evil.
Karen Hughes said, “I’m always a bit conflicted about Word. It often seems that the Mac version has some annoying bugs and limitations compared to the PC version. You can’t deny it is feature packed — but even with recent improvements things can be tricky to find. I have to use Word in Windows in my day job, so I find the similarities welcome, but I can understand how a purely Mac user may find them slightly less welcome.”
Dennis Fazio finds Word’s interface frustrating. “The most aggravating when it comes to mysterious formatting; can be very complex. Figuring out how to do something can be difficult even for veterans and near power users. Various controls are all over the place (in preferences, different places on the ribbon bar, etc.),” he said.
Jeff Hecht offered similar criticisms, saying, “Bluntly, a mess. Too many features duplicated in too many places, making it unwieldy and maddening to use. I have lost track of how many fonts it has accumulated, and how many styles build up on the selection menu. Features are poorly documented at best.”
But Word is highly capable. Dr. Z said, “I have used this product since Word 4. It has successfully produced many complex documents over the years, including my dissertation in 1998. In short, I can depend on it to accomplish demanding tasks, knowing that there is significant overhead in learning how to control some of the arcane/hidden commands. However, it would be nice if Microsoft would allow some Apple user interface gurus to retool all of the menus, ribbons, etc. to be more like the intuitive GUIs that are the norm for Apple-produced apps (excluding iTunes — which acts like Microsoft products).”
Harmon Abrahamson falls into the same category, saying, “I use Word daily, but almost never push it to the breaking (or stalling) point. Part of this is inertia; I have been a Word user since v1.0 in the mid-80s. I also work in a cross-platform department, and seamless exchange of documents with Windows users is essential.”
The Rest of the Word Processors — For the remaining 14 apps, we’ve listed the number of votes, rating, and price, and included a link to the app’s Web site, along with a link to any available comments about it.
- Adobe InCopy (65 votes, 1.38, $4.99 per month, 10.10+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- Apache OpenOffice Writer (128 votes, 2.29, Free, 10.7+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- Bean (139 votes, 2.76, Free, 10.12+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- Growly Write (45 votes, 1.76, Free, 10.8+)
- iText Express (46 votes, 1.76, Free, 10.6.6+)
- iText Pro (46 votes, 1.52, $11.99, 10.6.6+)
- LibreOffice Writer (242 votes, 2.80, Free, 10.8+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- LyX (51 votes, 1.92, Free, 10.4+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- Mariner Write (107 votes, 2.28, $29.95, 10.7+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- NeoOffice (170 votes, 2.26, $29.99, 10.8+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- Nisus Writer Express (127 votes, 2.94, $20, 10.8.5+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- Tex-Edit Plus (40 votes, 2.63, Free, 10.4+) — Read comments from the previous article.
- TinyWord (16 votes, 1.31, $7.99, 10.8+)
- Write 2 (42 votes, 1.50, $9.00, 10.4+)