On 6/16/11, John Brownie wrote:

>On Thu Jun 16 2011 08:28:52 GMT+1000 (PGT) Charles Suber wrote:
>
>> >What I really miss is having nameable user-defined rulers.<
>>I do agree! - Chuck Suber
>>
>
>I don't agree. I always had a hard time understanding the relationship between rulers and styles, which seemed to me to be fragile. I could do it, but things kept going wrong. I find the idea of a paragraph style much easier to work with - using the "based on" option works well for me. I like the way it works in NWP, although I agree on the need for "page break before" as a paragraph style option.

I would agree with this -- if NisusWriter could get its file format right. A very, very big IF. I finally am trying to shift from NW Classic to NW Pro -- and I discover that NisusWriter's files don't import properly into Quark Xpress. The RTF files won't import *at all*, and if I save in Word format, it still bollixes the format.

My workaround in NW Classic was simple: I had a macro which converted NW Classic files to XPress markup tags. This was easy, because all I wanted was the ruler name (to produce a style name tag), plus bold and italic. This doesn't work any more, because the user-defined rulers are gone.

NW Pro is in many ways a better program than Classic, but it REALLY does not play nice with the outside world. Note how many complaints we've had about interchange. And what I want isn't even anything fancy -- indeed, my goal is to be as un-fancy as possible. :-)

This is proving a very painful transition for me. I have been trying for weeks to get my macros re-written, and between the loss of rulers, the fact that PowerFind Pro is dramatically changed, and the rather weak documentation, it is not going too well....

-- 
Bob Waltz
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"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."