7/31/2013

[macsupport] Digest Number 9677

9 New Messages

Digest #9677

Messages

Tue Jul 30, 2013 8:46 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"Jurgen Richter" epsongroups

Seeing your situation, I would simply re-download version 20 from
Mozilla.com using Safari and either keep or trash the ones you don't
want elsewhere. The downloads are DMG disk images, that when opened,
make available the actual application which you then drag into your
"applications" folder. It is simply called Firefox, so you can rename
the others such as Firefox-20, etc... You can safely delete the ones you
don't want - simply delete them from the applications folder where they
should reside.

While you might be right, I've never had both versions of Firefox
running simultaneously; either one or the other myself. When the old one
runs, the new add-ons don't work. When the new one runs, old add-ons
want to get updated.... that is at least how it works for me.

Whichever version you then drag into applications is still simply
Firefox, which will locate your "account/profile" and load with your
bookmarks etc.
See: support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data

"Finding your profile without opening Firefox:

Open the Library folder for your Mac user account:
(OS X 10.6) Click the Finder icon in the dock. Your home folder
will be selected, (usually the name of your Mac user account). In the
right side of the window, click the Library folder to open it.
Open the "Application Support" folder, then open the "Firefox"
folder, and then the "Profiles"; folder.
Open the folder with "default" in the name to open your profile."

This is where all your preferences, histories and bookmarks are stored.
This would be the only file you need to restore for your Firefox profile.

If you restore now, all will be lost back to the restoration point. You
could make a clone of your current hard drive onto another external
right now, verify that it is bootable, and then go back in time to your
selected date and restore that point. From there, copy your selected
files and applications from that timeframe to your backup hard drive.

1Password is again a simple download, and drag the application to your
application folder. It will find your account once you login to your
password. If you restore to an earlier point in time, again you will
lose everything entered since.

As far as the other Adobe applications go, it's not as simple as
deleting or restoring the old applications. The software had to be
registered and activated; and there are some more steps involved, like
contacting Adobe if you don't de-activate the applications before
undetaking this task. There are also more parts scattered all over the
libraries folders, so these would require a full download and
reinstallation to work properly. Of course you'll need your licences and
registration info to re-activate the software.
A daunting task in any case as far as these applications go.

Simple enough for FF and 1Password and Adobe Reader (free)....

Once you reinstall all of your chosen file, I would clean the caches
out from Firefox, delete all recent histories therefrom.
(Under Preferences.... under the Advanced tab.... under the Network tab
: "Clear Now" under Cached Web Content )
Then go into your applications folder > then into utilities, and using
the drive utility, repair all the disk permissions for your boot drive.
Then reboot your mac and you should be good to go.

===

On 7/29/13 6:56 PM, N.A. Nada wrote:
> Have you tried deleting the Firefox app and installing Firefox v
20.0.0.1?
> You can download it from
>
> http://www.oldapps.com/mac/firefox.php?old_firefox=12093
<http://www.oldapps.com/mac/firefox.php?old_firefox=12093>

BRENT, I would prefer to RESTORE the FFv20 from my TimeMachine (TM) along
with its libraries which I seem to have deleted last month.

would that be possible and if so, which file name should I delete (if any)
and then which should I restore? Right now, I have versions 17 and 22
running or installed on the Pro. Should I delete both of these (how? just
delete the .app file?) then go into TM and restore the v20 .app and which
files should I restore to get my cached settings back along with my
bookmarks
which are gone, along with my history, etc. iow, I want to hunt and pick
which files to keep from April 19 I think it was.

thanks
chas

Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:09 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"Anna Larson" yovard@ymail.com


On July 25, 2013, at 19:30, Charles Carroll wrote:

> Looking for opinions on which is best. (...) I want something to edit moderately complex MS-Word files in their native format.

For *editing* Word documents quickly and effectively, especially if the editing involves repetitions (correcting similar mistakes over and over again) there is nothing better than the current version of Nisus Writer Pro (NWP).

It opens "moderately complex MS-Word files" using an importer based on LibreOffice, which is more complete than the Mac OS X importer. All Word Styles are preserved. You can therefore easily modify a style, if you want to do that. When you save the document again as .rtf or .doc all modifications you have done on them are accessible in Word. This is something you can't do in Pages, for example. I just tested it right now.

NWP has all the basic tools you expect to find in a good word processor (styles, multiple TOCs, Indexes, comments, track changes, tables, footnotes and endnotes, bookmarks, cross-references, etc.) What sets it apart from other word processors are mainly three features, and these features work seamlessly together:

1. Find and Replace
NWP has the best search and replace capabilities of all word processors that I have seen, and I have seen them all. :-) You can find virtually *everything* quickly and easily. And what you have found, you can replace by virtually everything, or manipulate it without end using the second feature, which are

2. Macros
This is the strongest argument for using NWP.
With the right macro you can clean up a whole document in seconds. You can use different types of macro language, including Perl scripts and GREP. As far as the Nisus Macro language is concerned though, for most tasks there is really no need to know Perl. -- Macros are stored as Nisus Writer Pro documents with the ending .nwm. They look exactly like normal documents, so you can use colors, formatting and styles when writing them, just as in a normal document. This makes writing macros easy. Macros can be *combined* with

3. Glossaries
You can (and should!) create and use Glossary files. The idea is similar to AutoText in MS Word (i.e. abbreviations with corresponding entries), but this is far better implemented in NWP. The entries can be as long as you wish. They can also contain tables, pictures and graphics. A "Glossary"; looks (almost) exactly like a normal Nisus document. You can apply elaborate formatting and colors to the entries. When you are done, you just need to type your abbreviation and your Glossary entry will be inserted immediately into your main document (where your cursor is). All my fancy *tables* are now stored in a Glossary. I don't have to waste time drawing up a table and format it when I need one. -- Every time I start a new project, I also create a new Glossary with entries I will be frequently using in the project, and I disable Glossaries I don't need at the moment (so typing "f" followed by a space can trigger expansion of different entries, depending on which Glossary is activated and which is not. You can activate them all, or use only those who you need for a particular project).

A clever way to use glossaries is to create a glossary for macros!!! Since many macros have the same elementary blocks and routines, there is no need to waste time by writing them over and over again. Instead you create a macro glossary with your favorite commands, routines and subroutines. Thus using a glossary can help you to "write" a long and complicated macro in no time!

You can also use glossary abbreviations *inside* a macro, which means, you let the macro type the abbreviation which triggers the expansion of the glossary entry.

This triple combination, which I have tried to describe above, makes NWP unique and my first choice when it comes to editing and manipulating text on the Mac.

Many people unfamiliar with NWP think, that if they don't find certain menu commands (such as "Compare Documents", "Table of Authorities", "Select Random Winner"), NWP will not be able to accomplish the task. Nothing could be more wrong. It only means, that out of the box NWP can't do it. Most advanced operations (such as concatenating and splitting files, swapping text chunks [i.e. making "Doe, John" look like "John Doe"], creating word lists, etc.) are done with macros.

NWP has
Track Changes (which work perfectly with MS Word)
Comments
Footnotes and Endnotes
Highlight and Background color
Lists
It has also 28 Tear-off palettes (one for each of the following: Character, Columns, Headers and Footers, Indexing, Language, Line Numbers, Lists, Margins, Page Borders, Page Zoom, Paragraph, Paragraph Borders, ParagraphShading, Section, Shape Fill, Shape Metrics, Shape Shadow, Shape Stroke, Shape Wrap, Shapes, Special Characters, Statistics, Styles, Table, Table Cell Borders, Table Cell Shading, Table Cells Table of Contents). These palettes can be shown or hidden and placed wherever you want on the screen. When NWP is first installed, (some of) these palettes are anchored in a drawer. I prefer to place them in one long column which I can drag around if I need. I keep the style palette on the left side of the screen so I can see all the styles I have at a glance. In MS Word for the Mac you can see maximal 5 styles in the Styles palette at the same time (in the PC version you can see more; if you want to see more in the Mac version, you'll have to do some tedious scrolling). This is just ONE example that shows how much better NWP is for serious writers when compared to Word.
Line Numbers
Character and Paragraph Styles
Extra language support for right to left languages (Hebrew, Arabic)
Multiple clipboards. Each one can be edited just as a normal document with all formatting tools available. For the more adventurous, if you want, you could use a macro to copy new stuff into new, empty clipboards � and then (when you are ready) concatenate all the stuff into a new file and place it beside your main window. Thus you would see all the snippets you have copied at a glance.
NWP is scriptable.

If you you are thinking about NeoOffice or LibreOffice, you should be aware of one major drawback. They are NOT scriptable! That means, you can't exchange data automatically with other scriptable programs via AppleScript. Why should you want to do that, you might ask. Well, suppose you use Filemaker Pro to keep track of your references. In Filemaker you can then send records automatically to NWP and tell NWP to manipulate and format the text according to the APA, MLA, Chicago or whatever reference style you prefer. This does not take more than one or two seconds. You can't do this with NeoOffice and LibreOffice. They can't send and receive Apple events, which I consider a serious drawback for advanced users.

>
> Table of Contents and Indexes would be nice but not necessary for all my projects.
>

You can create as many TOCs and indexes as you want in NWP.

If Word documents have complicated formatting, headers, fancy tables with multiple frames and shadows, they may not be converted correctly or not converted at all. This applies to other word processors as well. No word processor for the Mac used to be able to convert MS Word documents always 100% correctly. That's the main reason why I keep having MS Word installed on my computer.

There are a few important things missing in NWP:
There is
No audio and movie support
No split window yet (you'll have to use the multiple clipboards as a walkaround).
A table can not have footnotes and/or endnotes.

I hope this helps,

Anna

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Tue Jul 30, 2013 9:59 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"Dave C" davec2468

Anna,
Great review of Nisus. I keep forgetting about it as a WP. Nisus don't toot their horn very loudly.

No word processor for the Mac used to be able to convert MS Word documents always 100% correctly. That's the main reason why I keep having MS Word installed on my computer.

(Your tenses got me mixed up -- does NWP convert Word docs 100%?)

That is the sole reason to not buy another WP app -- if one needs to keep Word for compatiblility reasons, who wants to pay for 2?

Dave

Sent from my phone.
Please forgive auto-fill errors and typos.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Tue Jul 30, 2013 10:12 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"Anna Larson" yovard@ymail.com


On July 26, 2013, at 07:26, Randy B. Singer wrote:

> I am the head of a Mac user group for attorneys. Over 9,000 of them. Many of these folks would love to be using anything other than Word...but they can't. Only Word, for the Mac, has all of the advanced features that an attorney needs, such as document comparison, tables of authorities, collaboration, etc.

What do you mean exactly by "collaboration"? Online collaboration? If you mean "track changes", then NWP can do that too, and they work flawlessly with track changes in Word.

NWP can do both document comparison and tables of authorities (TOA). TOA is a profession-specific index; most people don�t even know what it is. I have never had to create one myself (and hopefully never will :-) but apparently it�s easier to create a TOA in NWP than in MS Word. There are obviously several ways to do this. Here is a detailed description for attorneys how to do this in NWP:

http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5334&hilit=authorities

I�m curious. What other advanced features does an attorney need? Please give me a list, and I will see if the features are available in NWP. Thanks in advance.

Anna

Tue Jul 30, 2013 10:35 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"T Hopkins" todhop

The "best" alternative is very specific to your needs. All OpenOffice variants can open just most Word docs and can write Word docs effectively, but translations are not perfect and some features are not supported will (like comments). NeoOffice is the most "mac like" OpenOffice variant, but all versions including OpenOffice and LIbreOffice are similarly adept at translation.

But you must take into account that even versions of Word are not perfectly compatible. For instance, going from Word on Windows to Word on Mac has always been a bit buggy. Going from Word's new "docx" back to an earlier version (such as 2008 on Mac) can have issues. My biggest frustration in document translation is actually font/character substitution, which has nothing to do with program versions.

If being "compatible&quot; is the prime directive, you need Word itself. In the end, the only way you will convince anyone else it's "not you" that caused the problem by using the current version of Word. It's simple politics. But if one is willing to give up some level of compatibility, almost everything out there is "better" in some way. If they weren't, they would not exist. And since you are on Mac, you've already given up the "high ground" with Word users. ;)

I'm quite happy with NeoOffice. Have used it for several years now in collaboration with Word users. Translations are not perfect, but generally are not a significant problem. As I said, font substitution is the bigger problem. I occasionally fall back on Word 2000 for Windows to solve or check compatibility issues.

cheers,
tod

On Jul 25, 2013, at 1:30 PM, Charles Carroll wrote:

> Looking for opinions on which is best. Here is my research base so far:
>
> http://voices.yahoo.com/5-free-alternatives-microsoft-word-7038118.html
>
> http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html
>
> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3815575?start=0&tstart=0
>
> http://www.pcworld.com/article/218037/microsoft_word_replacements.html
>
> http://lifehacker.com/5867623/the-best-word-processing-app-for-windows
>
> I want something to edit moderately complex MS-Word files in their
> native format.
>
> High end features like smart art, word art and Table of Contents and
> Indexes would be nice but not necessary for all my projects.
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Tue Jul 30, 2013 10:36 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"T Hopkins" todhop

FYI, NeoOffice does not handle the newest tracking and commenting features well in translation. Can NWP handle Word comments?

On Jul 30, 2013, at 1:12 PM, Anna Larson wrote:

>
> On July 26, 2013, at 07:26, Randy B. Singer wrote:
>
>> I am the head of a Mac user group for attorneys. Over 9,000 of them. Many of these folks would love to be using anything other than Word...but they can't. Only Word, for the Mac, has all of the advanced features that an attorney needs, such as document comparison, tables of authorities, collaboration, etc.
>
>
> What do you mean exactly by "collaboration"? Online collaboration? If you mean "track changes", then NWP can do that too, and they work flawlessly with track changes in Word.
>
> NWP can do both document comparison and tables of authorities (TOA). TOA is a profession-specific index; most people don�t even know what it is. I have never had to create one myself (and hopefully never will :-) but apparently it�s easier to create a TOA in NWP than in MS Word. There are obviously several ways to do this. Here is a detailed description for attorneys how to do this in NWP:
>
> http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5334&hilit=authorities
>
>
> I�m curious. What other advanced features does an attorney need? Please give me a list, and I will see if the features are available in NWP. Thanks in advance.
>
>
> Anna
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Group FAQ:
> <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/macsupportcentral/files/faq.htm>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>

Tue Jul 30, 2013 1:20 pm (PDT) . Posted by:

"Anna Larson" yovard@ymail.com


On July 30, 2013, at 18:59, Dave C wrote:

> Nisus don't toot their horn very loudly.
>

That's very true, Dave, and it makes me kind of sad. "Nisus Software" is a small company, and they don't seem to know how to sell their product. There is not even a short tutorial from them on YouTube. But they are extremely helpful, if one needs help. Their email service is great. You don't have to fill out boring web forms; you can send them normal emails with screen shots, and they always reply within 24 hours. And there is an active community with specialists always ready to help.

The developers work slowly, but new features are very well though out. A good example is the Document Manager. It looks so simple when you see it the first time. Many users, including me, thought it was useless, when it first appeared. Now I love it; it's extremely powerful and awesome, if you are regularly working on a project. It's a bit like DEVONthink Pro Office for NWP. :-)

>> No word processor for the Mac used to be able to convert MS Word documents always 100% correctly. That's the main reason why I keep having MS Word installed on my computer.
>
> (Your tenses got me mixed up -- does NWP convert Word docs 100%?)
>

Sorry, you are right. This was a bit ambivalent. What I intended to say is this: In the past, none of the word processors could *always* convert Word files 100% correctly. 100% means no font substitution, no extra empty lines, no formatting changes. I used to test this regularly, but I have stopped doing it now. There have been huge improvements, and since I have always had all available word processors for the Mac installed on my computer, there is actually no need for me to go on with this testing any longer; things are also constantly changing all the time. What is true today, is invalid tomorrow. -- NWP scores fairly well, if you save the document as Rich Text File.

> That is the sole reason to not buy another WP app -- if one needs to keep Word for compatiblility reasons, who wants to pay for 2?
>

Word is good. I like many of the special features; it has some that NWP does not have, such as ClipArt, although you can of course open documents with ClipArt in NWP.

NWP is for people who are obsessed with producing, editing and reading text. If you want to do this in Word, you need macros and knowledge in Visual Basic, I think. Maybe somebody on this list can enlighten us and tell us how easy or how difficult macros are in MS Word for the Mac. I can't remember having seen anything on that on this list.

If Word macros are inappropriate topic for this list, please let me know. If there is another list available that is specially dedicated to this topic, please let me know.

Thanks,

Anna

Wed Jul 31, 2013 12:48 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"Anna Larson" yovard@ymail.com


On July 30, 2013, at 19:36, T Hopkins wrote:

> Can NWP handle Word comments?
>
>

Yes.

I tested this once again today.

I created three files with text containing SmartArt and two comments, and saved them in Word as
docx
doc and
rtf

The comments were formatted and had color, and one word in the comments had the attribute "Text Highlight Yellow". As User Information I used a European name that requires unicode (�ur��ur �orl�ksd�ttir).

Before I had even started to convert the files, Word had already screwed up the commentator&#39;s name in the RTF file (!!!) The other formats rendered the commentator&#39;s name correctly.

The conversion results:

= > The rtf version was 100% correct. All formatting in the comments was preserved, even the garbage from Word (i.e. the commentator&#39;s name) was preserved! :-)

In the doc version the *formatting* of the comments was gone. The main text and the SmartArt were correct.

In the docx version the commentator&#39;s name was gone; otherwise everything was like in the doc version.

So the result was as expected:
Rich Text File is always best. The other formats should be used with caution when compatibility is an important issue.

Anna

Wed Jul 31, 2013 4:53 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"Randy B. Singer" randybrucesinger


On Jul 30, 2013, at 10:12 AM, Anna Larson wrote:

> NWP can do both document comparison and tables of authorities (TOA). TOA is a profession-specific index; most people don�t even know what it is. I have never had to create one myself (and hopefully never will :-) but apparently it�s easier to create a TOA in NWP than in MS Word. There are obviously several ways to do this. Here is a detailed description for attorneys how to do this in NWP:

You are clearly a zealous advocate of Nisus, and I'm afraid that while Nisus is a very nice mid-market word processor, it isn't as powerful are you claim that it is. For instance, your example of it being "easier to create a TOA in NWP than in MS Word" is just wishful thinking on your part. Yes, your link does show how you can use a kludge to approximate this capability in Nisus; that's not the same as using the feature built-in to Word. The same with document comparison. Wishing that Nisus was a high-end competitor to MS Word doesn't make it one. You won't find Nisus in hardly any serious business offices. However, it is a very nice processor for home/student use.

As far as compatibility with Word documents, Nisus uses an open source Word translator that is, in fact, the same one used in all of the OpenOffice siblings. That translator is decent, but far from perfect. If one's job relies on having Word documents render perfectly when opened and worked on, this translator can't be relied on to do that in every single case.

I do recommend that folks have a look at the free demos of a number of word processors before choosing one. There is a slightly outdated, but otherwise comprehensive list of Word processors for the Mac here:
http://www.emailman.com/software/wordproc/mac.html

Missing from that list are:

Bean (free)
http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html

Pages ($20)
http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/
Apple offers free tutorials on how to use Pages here:
http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/#pages-hero

PageSmith ($40)
http://fortunatebear.com/products/pagesmith/

LibreOffice (free)
http://www.libreoffice.org

The original poster to this thread asked for a "Word clone" and...:

> I want something to edit moderately complex MS-Word files in their
> native format.
>
> High end features like smart art, word art and Table of Contents and
> Indexes would be nice but not necessary for all my projects.

Nisus isn't a Word clone (LibreOffice, NeoOffice and Apache OpenOffice *are*)...though Nisus might be able to meet most of his needs.
It might be worth taking for a spin to find out.

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________

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