sticklen@pleiades.cps.msu.edu (Jon Sticklen) (09/21/90)
i have a copy now of the Nisus 3.01 demo disk. it does look like a very nice WP package. but there are some features that i live or die by that i cannot find. - bibliographic support - symbolic referencing eg, when i put a figure in FullWrite i have the ability to refer to in the text of a paper in a symbolic manner. the big win is that if the order of figures changes, my text is updated automatically with the appropriate figure number. maybe these things exist in nisus and i just can't find them. eg, XREF facility in Nisus would be a good guess for a symbolic referencing facility but i can't figure out how. (it might help if the HELP files were shipped with the demo disk...) so... for those folks already using Nisus for real - does it have symbolic referencing or not, and if it does, how do you use it? thanks, ---jon---
gdavis@primate.wisc.edu (Gary Davis) (09/23/90)
From article <1990Sep21.142545.5966@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu>, by sticklen@pleiades.cps.msu.edu (Jon Sticklen): > i have a copy now of the Nisus 3.01 demo disk. it does look like > a very nice WP package. but there are some features that i > live or die by that i cannot find. > - bibliographic support > - symbolic referencing > > eg, when i put a figure in FullWrite i have the ability > to refer to in the text of a paper in a symbolic manner. > the big win is that if the order of figures changes, > my text is updated automatically with the appropriate > figure number. I haven't used FullWrite for quite a while, and I don't remember exactly how its symbolic referencing works. But you can do something similar in Nisus. With the XRef facility you canfirst mark the figure caption (Say Figure 2.) Then you can set up cross references to the text of the marked caption; that is, you can insert "Figure 2" wherever you need it in your text. If you ever change the caption to "Figure 3" then the cross references in the text will change to 3 also. With the aid of a simple macro you could also arrange to have all figures automatically given sequential numbers. Nisus has no built-in bibliographic support. Actually one reason I know longer use FullWrite is that I found its bibliographic facility to be too inflexible to be useful for me. With Nisus, I just type references or parts of references into the text using brackets around them or a special style so they can all be pulled out into a seperate file by means of GREP and macros when I'm done. The style could include the "invisible" style so the full references wouldn't clutter the text while you're writing. Nisus' index facility can also be used in conjunction with user styles to form seperate lists of all kinds of different elements in your text. Once you have a list with references it can be easy to format it appropriately for a bibliography with GREP and macros. A macro could also be used to number the references in the text sequentially if that the format required. Gary Davis