A quick straw poll. I’m looking for a word processor which enables me to quickly format long documents. I’ve been trying nisus writer pro which does a good job, but looking around online it doesn’t seem to be that widely used (maybe it had a heyday in the late 2000s?).
I’m curious, which word processor are you using and how are you automating it to format text? (Or automating it to do anything!)
I’ve used NWP since the mid-2000s…also use Pages which is more accessible (AppleScript vs. Perl…).
While, Scrivener really isn’t a word processor, it does an excellent job of formatting long documents.
I go with the philosophy writing can be done in a plain text editor and once I’ve completed writing Scrivener then can compile the text into any format that I want. If you create a lot of long documents then Scrivener might be something to look at.
I use two Word Processors.
If I get something in DOCX format, I use Microsoft Word. I’ve been using it since some time in the early 1990s and for my work in the 2000s I inherited a small scale fulfilment system that ran off word and OLE (for those who remember that), and I rewrote it in pure VBA for all the automation.
I don’t really have any automations on my Mac for it as I don’t actually work on Word documents much outside of work. However, I do have some automations coded into my default document template just to speed up little bits and pieces - e.g. refresh all inserted fields, including in headers and footers and taking account of repagination for table of contents.
When I’m on my Mac and not working explicitly on DOCX, then I tend to be in Nisus Writer Pro (NWP), which you have already mentioned. Once again, I don’t use it a great deal, but in the past, I have created custom automations to help me maintain documentation for volunteer orgnisations I’ve been involved with. This has primarily been built around having modularity in content and using NWP to dynamically pull in content and regenerate a version for distribution - typically online publishing as a PDF.
Most of my text work tends to take place in plain text files using Markdown, and with the use of tools like Pandoc, I can often get pretty good results when I need to produce a final version. However, nothing gives you quite as much control as using a Word Processor on the pagination side of things, so if that’s important I will always happily fall back to NWP.
Hope that’s useful.