Nisus and Mellel

Seth Goldin recently changed to Nisus (coup for them). If you deal with pure words, I guess the interface is the main feature and it is a fine piece of work. Two small companies allow me to download trial versions compare products for a feature that is important to me. Support forums are available online that enable me to check how responsive (or not) the company is to a feature request. As a consequence, I am an informed customer, and one less likely to gripe afterwards.

I’m using an iBook G4 at home as my main computer. Word 2004 is slooooow sluggish and treacle like on this machine. I’ve been looking at a lightweight word-processor for some time. The competition comes down to

Nisus wins on interface and the way you can have draft view and page view at different scales. Alas, it looses on mathematical formulas and diagrams. Formulas made with the LaTeX Equation Editor are printed as bitmaps by Nisus. This issue was raised on the support forum in October 2004 and there has apparently been no movement since, and that indicates that Nisus is aimed at people who do words and not diagrams. Mellel is not as intuitive an interface to my current way of thinking, but the package will accept PDF formulas and print and save them smoothly to PDF and RTF.

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