Voyager persistent links
Before getting to the point of this post, I thought I’d mention the persistent link we’ve added to each item in our OPAC (useful when someone wants to directly reference an individual item in the catalog).
Over the weekend I received an email from an iNode reader in New Zealand asking how that was done. To prove there’s very little wizardry involved, I offer this link for any interested Voyager admin (and putting it here will help me remember how I did it the next time a Voyager upgrade trashes local modifications):
http://deskbox.gmu.edu/voyagerpersistentlink.html
Now, on with the post…
Finding a new word processor
I’ve been spending a lot more time with intel Macs lately (specifically the MacPro). These machines are so fast I’m really beginning to resent the sluggish performance of applications that require Rosetta (the PowerPC emulation technology).
I can’t do much about Dreamweaver (use it maybe once a week) or Photoshop (a bit more often) but I think I can do something about the third head of this bloatware hydra—Word. All I really want is word processor. I rarely do labels, mailmerge, change tracking or 90% of the other “features” a program like Word puts at my fingertips (assuming my fingertips aren’t already occupied thumbing through the manual or pounding keys in the help window). On some level it seems a real waste of electrons to launch a huge emulator-hobbled application just to type up a memo…
I gave some thought to NeoOffice (which offers both PPC and Intel versions) but it’s still a beta product (Aqua Beta 3 as I write this) and has performance issues as well. Besides, I’m not looking for a full Office replacement–just a Intel-native OSX word processor that reads and writes Word files, understands RTF, uses few resources when idle, seems snappy when working, and doesn’t complicate things by offering too much more than the features I’ll actually use.
I looked around and found several candidates.
Mellel is an interesting and well-regarded program but its real power seems to be directed at a problem I don’t often have–work with footnotes, endnotes and multiple languages. I liked a number of Mellel’s features and guess I could grow to tolerate the default brushed metal interface but for now I’ll pass. Continuing the quest, I also took quick looks at AbiWord and Mariner Write but for different reasons neither made a very good first impression.
Finally, I hit on Nisus Writer Express (2.7).
As one who switched to a Mac a little over two years ago, I guess I can be forgiven for not knowing that during the Classic era, Nisus was one of the major players in the Mac word processor market. Their “Nisus Writer” never made the jump to OS X and market share/interest inevitably dwindled. Rather than port Nisus Writer to OS X, Nisus purchased Okito Composer and began development of Nisus Writer Express (NWE) based on that Cocoa foundation (which explains the speed with which a Universal binary version appeared when needed).
There’s a lot to like in NWE.
It is fast and a universal application but it also plays well with the other 95% of the world that’s using Microsoft Word. 
NWE reads and writes most Word files without much difficulty which isn’t to say there aren’t a few problem areas. I had uneven results with some complex Word documents (but not every one I tried) and lost images in any document where text flowed around embedded graphics.
Beyond those problems (neither of which represent a significant percentage of the documents I encounter each day) compatiblity was very good.
Pros: a real-time thesarus that’s unobtrusive but helpful (displays word alternatives in a pane while you’re typing—meaning you can ignore it until you reach a spot in the document where your vocabulary begins to fail you); the ability to use regular expressions in the find/replace function; support for Perl macros; support for what I’d call OLE (if it wasn’t already called LinkBack) with applications like OmniGraffle or OmniOutliner; a very simple to use implementation of tables and more.
So (for now at least) Nisus Writer Express is my word processor of choice. If I receive a document that opens with problems, I’ll revert to Word…or perhaps Pages (in my tests I found that Pages had no trouble opening and displaying documents when text flowed around embedded images).
In any case, the price is right ($39 for an academic license) and development seems active (several new releases in the past year). Both Mellel ($35 for an academic license) and NWE offer 30 day demos.