I’d like to take this opportunity to add some other small but valuable suggestions to the main five. The DejaVu Serif typeface doesn’t have oldstyle figures, but I had to go to Format and Font menus and invoke the typography panel to realise that it supports only three OpenType features. Given that the control of end-of-line word partitions is quite limited in NWP, this feature would be a much appreciated refinement. Moreover, to prevent a word from breaking, InDesign allows the user to insert a soft hyphen right at the beginning of a word. Sure I could use the hard space to solve the first need, but, what about the other two?Īs it is in InDesign, a no-break character attribute could even be assigned to a character style. Let’s say (1) I have the article a or the pronoun I at the end of a line in a left-aligned paragraph and I want to make it inseparable from the next word (2) I could as well have an em dash in the same position and want to do the same with it (see the image below) (3) I may have the word InDesign and want to make it unbreakable. Here we go with a few ideas about typesetting. As a non-developer, I’m unaware of what it would take to dodge such a limitation. Unfortunately, LanguageTool requires a Java installation. Its syntactic rules will always leave margin for errors, but, thanks to them, a lot of mistakes show up on the screen when it’s activated. The LanguageTool extension for LibreOffice, however, does a good job. The tool that goes beyond those limitations is a grammar checker, an extension or plug-in which will never be perfect, because languages are too unpredictable and complex for them to be fully covered by a software engine. LanguageTool integrationĪnother language-related suggestion before moving on to typesetting, and again, something easier said than done.Įvery meticulous author knows of the limitations of spell checking on text processors. See the Thesaurus palette in Nisus Writer, a handy tool. ![]() However, having synonyms at hand when writing is such a pleasure that I felt compelled to elaborate on this proposal here. Moreover, the English thesaurus already installed in NWP comes from the WordNet database, something different from OpenThesaurus files. I understand that developing such a feature is trickier than just permitting the addition of a file to a folder. So then, the same way a user can install a hyphenation dictionary, why not provide him or her with a destination to install the thesaurus file? The Catalan one is, and the good ones include a thesaurus. Not all LibreOffice extensions are well built by definition. Manually adding soft hyphens to specific words is not very efficient. This could be implemented as it is in InDesign, namely, allowing for an editable “user dictionary”. These customisations are possible in InDesign and LibreOffice.Īnother missing feature is the possibility of setting special partition points inside words, in both known and learned words. What users can’t do is to customise other parameters, such as the minimum amount of letters after the beginning or before the ending of a word and the maximum number of consecutive hyphens. Users can set the Prevent Hyphenation parameter in paragraph styles (an option not present in the Paragraph palette), which is suitable when setting styles for titles. ![]() On the not-so-convenient side of things, there are two features missing in NWP. ![]() As for the LibreOffice extensions repository, go to LO Extension Center and search for your language of interest under the category “Dictionaries of different languages for all program modules”. See “ What languages can Nisus Writer hyphenate?” on the FAQ section of Nisus’ website and you’ll find the destination for new dictionaries. On one hand, users are allowed to install the hyphenation dictionaries included in LibreOffice extensions. The way NWP handles end-of-line word partitions is rather convenient, and yet incomplete. All the suggestions come from my appreciation for typography and language. Even though both applications fulfil different needs, a certain number of their features shouldn’t be seen as exclusive to each application. Some of the ideas developed in the following lines come from the experience of using InDesign, a piece of software that I don’t see as a rival to NWP. ![]() Five suggestions to make Nisus Writer Pro betterĪs a proud Nisus Writer Pro (NWP) user, I’m glad to put forth a few ideas which I reckon would add value to this already noteworthy word processor.
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