Nisus Writer Pro - Manual (Page 73)

Creating Documents 53
Managing… Saving and Opening Your Files
When the Macintosh was first released in 1984 you needed to save your files on 400K floppy disks.
An old one-page plain text file would take up about 4K, so you might be able to store nearly 100
files on a single disk. Keeping track of a couple hundred files on a few floppy disks did not seem a
hardship then. Now, more than 25 years later, a Macintosh comes with a hard drive of at least
60GB and, even allotting for the space of the OS and many applications, songs downloaded to
iTunes and digital images organized in iPhoto, you probably still have many gigabytes of space
remaining for the thousands of files you have created in the intervening years. Numerous
applications have been released recently that attempt a solution for tracking files. Using the
Document Manager of Nisus Writer Pro you can pay less attention to saving and locating your files
and more attention to their contents.
Saving Files
Nisus Writer Pro offers you several ways to save a document.
Completely ignore saving documents. Nisus Writer Pro (with the Autosave preference turned on)
automatically names them, based any text in a heading or title style at the top of the document,
and, unless you change this in the Saving preferences, stores the file in the following folder
~/Documents/Nisus Documents
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You can easily find and open these documents using the Document Manager illustrated in Figure 52
on page 57. (Choose the menu command Window > Document Manager and open the file you want.)
In addition, you can explicitly save your files by choosing the menu command File > Save As….
When you save your file for the first time by choosing the menu command File > Save As…, Nisus
Writer Pro opens the Save As dialog and places the first few words of the document in the filename
field at the top of the dialog. This also enables you to rename or save your file in a variety of formats
and encodings. The following alternatives explain the various methods of saving your files
• Save
saves changes to the selected drive;
• Save As…
saves changes as a new file and allows you to continue editing that file with a new name
(leaving the original file with its original name);
• Save in Document Manager
saves the changes to the Document Manager folder you have designated.
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Some files that Nisus Writer Pro creates can only be read (opened) by Nisus Writer Pro as text files (for
example a PDF file). Nisus Writer Pro opens HTML files as they would appear in a Web browser. You
can, however, also edit these HTML files in Nisus Writer Pro. For instructions see “Save a Nisus Writer
Pro Document as an HTML Document” on page 423.
Formats of saved files
Nisus Writer Pro makes a slight distinction between “saving” and “exporting” files.
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Save As… should always preserve document content. Any format under Export As… cannot be
trusted to fully preserve document information. No “export” format will preserve all the important
information—even if the document “looks” right, important things, such as styles, may not persist.
You can save a Nisus Writer Pro document (in order of preferred format):
Save As…
• a Rich Text Format (RTF) file. This is the preferred format, so others can read your files.
• a Document Template (DOT). When saved in this manner, every time you open the file, it opens
as “Untitled” with all the text and formatting present when you saved it as a “.dot”.
• a Microsoft Word Format (97 and later also known as “.doc”) file.
• a Rich Text Format Directory (RTFD) file. This is similar to RTF, but saves any images in the
file in a separate folder from the text of the file. This file format is generally not recognized by
non-Macintosh computers.
• a Nisus Compressed Rich Text (a gzipped RTF) file to save space, with the extension “.zrtf”.
This reduces the size of files that Nisus Writer Pro saves. No other application understands this
format, but it reduces file size by a large amount. You can rename a file from “FileName.zrtf” to
“FileName.rtf.zip” and the Finder will expand the file into a normal RTF file.
• a Plain Text file (no formatting is saved).