Omni Page Pro 14

Nisus Writer Pro 2.0: The Review

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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 that Nisus pioneered features that are now nearly universal, such as noncontiguous selection (now called “multipart” selection) and unlimited undo and redo.