I am being told that if you are a really state-of-the-art academic, you use neither Nisus, nor Mellel (and certainly not Word), but LaTeX. Until Nisus improved to the point when, as had been the case with Nisus Classic, I was back to the feeling that Nisus was writing with me, and Mellel was asking me to please it, somehow. For a long time I updated both, and often wrote a bit in one, a bit in the other. As for myself, I bought both, and for something like a year I used only Mellel, because Nisus Express was not enough for me at the time and I am adamant I won't use Word. There may be some for which it is as you say. I notice that this Mellel-Nisus debate generally comes back to a retroactive justification of a purchase decision, or of a decision to use a word processor that no one else does, despite the fact that no one else does. In order to escape this fundamental insecurity, we must decide in favor of our own being, and decisively so, and assume the consequences of that decision to its conclusion. This said, Word 2004 is probably a good choice of word processor today (and I recognize how counter-intuitive this seems, because it wasn't even good in 2004), at least for scholars, because now it supports integration with arguably the best citation manager to ever exist, Zotero. Cervantes and Joyce and Auerbach all worked without Nisus, without Mellel, and we can, too. For me-as someone writing scholarly articles and so forth in the humanities-no word processing application really works with or against me, as you suggest. This leaves you with two documents all the time, cluttering things up (and it can get confusing). You can only do the scan at the very end, for one, because if you edit the output document, then your original is out of date. SCRIVENER VS NISUS WRITER PRO SOFTWAREThe problem with using Nisus with bibliographic software is that you need to do an rtf scan this presents a number of difficulties. But the original poster in this case already knows Mellel. Mellel is quirky, but I wouldn't say learning it is "hell." You learn as you go. OmniOutliner, because it can export RTF, works perfectly with Nisus.īasically, if you want to use a word processor that flows the way you do (and is that customizable that it really can) and is rock solid and is a joy to use and whose files can be read by Word or by OpenOffice natively and interfaces with Bookends and Endnote and Sente, then 'average' or not, Nisus is your choice. As for the outliner, I prefer to use OmniOutliner for that as well rather than a watered down version of an outliner in a word processor. It still lacks image captioning, table wrapping, and certain other things that would make it perfect for academic writing. And, also, and I believe that this is a much more important point, who wants to deal with a closed file-type that only one word processor on the planet can read - a word processor that almost no one outside of a small niche in academia uses. SCRIVENER VS NISUS WRITER PRO PRONisus Writer Pro is my word processor of choice, and I think Endnote kicks Bookends' hindparts when it comes to integration into the OS (specifically, the Services menu, which allows for a very cool workflow between Nisus and Endnote).Īlthough Mellel and Bookends are paired together nicely, who wants to go through the hell of learning Mellel just to get to work with Bookends. This said, I do like Nisus, and if it's your cup of tea there's a lot to recommend it, particularly macros and real multilingual spell checking, neither of which Mellel has. I'm also fine with the development pace of Mellel for the most part, since it already does basically what I want it to-I would never use, say, x-refs in a manuscript, nor would I need a commenting feature for a app/format that very few people I know use. Regarding the latter, I have posted around here more than once with the suggestion that Nisus consider developing some way of integrating Zotero, for example, with no response. my dissertation), if just for its stability and Bookends (or Sente) integration: Nisus still crashes a fair amount and it doesn't have the kind of integration with Bookends and Sente that I really appreciate in Mellel. There's much about Nisus that I like, but Mellel is the place I tend to write longer and more important documents (e.g. SCRIVENER VS NISUS WRITER PRO LICENSEMy experience-as someone who partially switched from Mellel a while back (that is, I bought a license for NWE, then Pro, and have used it off and on)-is that for scholarly writing Mellel still can't be beat.
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