Being obsessed with the flexible storage and retrieval of information, I use an outliner all the time - Symmetry Software's Acta. Being an academic, I use Acta mostly to hold my notes on books that I read, and to prepare and update notes for lectures I intend to give. You know what an outliner is: it holds text in a form that looks like - well, an outline

The power of a computer is to store, manipulate, and retrieve information; the power of the Macintosh is to present visual representations of that information which can be directly manipulated by the user

Now Utilities (hereinafter, NU) is a collection of system extensions, most of which started as shareware or freeware on the nets, where faithful fans could not imagine life without them

Here's one more drop in the never-ending flow of One Person's Opinions comparing Nisus 3.06 and Word 5.0. Your mileage may vary, and this is certainly not the last word - pun intended, as I suspect that Word 6.0 (mid-1993 is the current fantasy prediction) will change things considerably, especially if it includes a macro language and automatic numbering of figures, cross-referencing, and so forth. These comments adopt roughly the order and categories of my review of Nisus, published by TidBITS and living on sumex-aim.stanford.edu as /info-mac/digest/tb/tidbits-nisus.etx; see it for more detail if desired

If you want just one or two side-by-side paragraphs, or a short stretch of material in a different columnization from your document, you can have it, provided it does not involve run-over to a second page: the Paragon people have gone to the elaborate trouble of building a Place Page facility into the program

I have said nothing up to now about the manual. I'll try to be brief about this: Unless it has been heavily rewritten since the version that came with Nisus 3.01, the manual is frankly bad

Adam and I each get a separate say here, since our differing uses for a computer give us differing orientations on Nisus (though we are in agreement over the details of Nisus's strengths and weaknesses). [Matt] For large documents with layout needs such as tables, Nisus cannot compete with Word

Nisus 3.06 Paragon Concepts 990 Highland Dr., Suite 312 Solana Beach CA 92075 800/922-2993 619/481-1477 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Price and Availability: -- Nisus is readily available from most mail order houses for approximately $250

The horizontal ruler area at the top of a text window contains the expected formatting tools: you can set the paragraph containing the insertion point to be ragged-right, ragged-left, centered, or right-and-left justified; you can insert four kinds of tabs; increment or decrement line leading and paragraph leading; and, of course, slide the wrapping margins

The Paragon people at some point decided that this way of working with formats was incomplete, and so a second level of hierarchy is included, Named Rulers

The top level in the formatting hierarchy is User-Defined Styles. In Nisus, the term Style in this context does not refer to paragraph formatting per se

We turn now to the bottom level of Nisus, the area where the nitty-gritty is, the stuff that Nisus seems truly made for: the find-and-replace and macro/programming facilities. You set up a find or find-and-replace in a dialog window, and the flexibility of what you can do is astonishing

The macro facility is divided into two levels, referred to as Macros and Programming. The difference is formal: the two levels involve different commands, which cannot be combined on a single line of a macro (though they can be combined within a single macro), and the Programming Dialect requires the presence of a special interpreter file

We now come to the top layer of Nisus, a number of miscellaneous page-layout features cobbled together (a recent MacUser refers to it as a "Swiss-Army knife," an apt comparison)

by Matt Neuburg -- [email protected] (with comments by Adam C. Engst -- [email protected]) NOTE: My original review was too long, so Adam decided to cut some of the detailed technical discussion