Nisus Writer Pro was released today!
New features include table of contents, indexing, widow/orphan control, expanded control over footnotes, and more. I’ve always been of the opinion that Nisus has the best interface and is the nicest to use out of all the OS X word processors (not to mention using RTF as its native format, which I very much approve of), and now it finally has some key features that made Pages and Mellel more appealing.
Definitely worth checking out.
Thanks for the hint. I downloaded the hefty 103 MB (!) demo version yesterday and started my test-drive.
It looks beautiful, and the first impression is indeed: If there is anything one can do with text, this program is capable to do it. Even automatically, if you want. Beyond that it offers a wealth of functions you never even dreamed of. Plus an incredible detailled manual as PDF, more than 400 well-written pages.
But…
It misses some serious things, at least from my point of view.
(1) Try to import a Word-document: Even TextEdit does it better. NWP is practically unusable for this purpose, and this is a severe drawback in a world where the MS-DOC-format is, unfortunately, a standard you are very often confronted with.
(2) It seems not to be possible to define a paragraph style that enforces a page-break before. This is a very common function in a lot of other textprocessors (WORD, NeoOffice at least), often named “begin this paragraph on a new page” (or in a new column) or the like and of course very useful for chapter headings.
In NisusWriter Pro, you have to insert an enforced page break before the chapter heading, after the last line of the text before, which is very unhandy and error-prone.
So, although I like the program very much because of its beauty and its radiance of reliability (and the full screen view is great as well), it will not be very long with me, I’m afraid. (Still 14 days, I assume…) 
To this unfortunately it must be added that NWPro definitely is not a good choice for those who use to work with long documents. When the document gets longer, NWPro (like NWE) gets slower and slower; and with very long documents with a host of footnotes, it becomes completely unusable. For me, this is an absolute dealbreaker.
Moreover, many features which as such are interesting and handy, are not finished off so neatly as one might desire. I give just one example. A very nice feature, which is almost inexistent in the present generation of wordprocessors, is horizontal grouping of footnotes. But it is not possible to determine the exact amount of interspace between the end of an note and the beginning of the next note: this is being done automatically by the program. But it does so in a very haphazard and unpredictable way: sometimes the interspace is rather small, other times it is rather large. This gives an apparatus of horizontally grouped footnotes a chaotic outlook, and makes horizontal grouping unusable for those who like to finish off neatly their documents.
So although NWPro as such, as far as myself is concerned, is a very nice program (it could even become my wordprocessor of choice, if everything worked as one might expect), it looks like the more demanding among us will have to wait for version 2.0 before considering buying it.
What did the documents you were importing contain? I’ve never had any problems importing Word docs with Express, and I can’t imagine Pro would be all that different.
Then again, I don’t have Word docs with much more than styled text. Never really experimented with images, tables, etc.
I had the same experience with NWE. A great disappointment after writing a book in the old System 9 Nisus, which was a terrific app.
I tried to stick with Nisus in OS X but the contrast between its long-document behavior with that of almost any other program – Mellel, Mariner, even Word – was just too large.
OTOH, felix culpa – my search for a better solution led me eventually to Scrivener!
David