[Macworld]

Post your comments for Mellel 2.6 here

[SimoneUe]

I use Mellel for academic writing. It takes an awful long time to set it up the way you want it to behave, but once this is done, it's the best writing experience I've ever had.

[Lebensmuede]

Anyone happen to know how this compares to Nisus Writer?

[Gibbor53]

Mellel is an outstanding word processor. The greatest "con," however, is not the lack of this or that feature, it is the fact that Mellel has very little acceptance in the publishing world. This means that you will always be reformatting your texts to other formats (usually Word's .doc) in order for them to be accepted for publication. Even for file exchange with other individuals, you will find few who use Mellel. That said, it is a great tool for academic writers.

[Gibbor53]

Mellel is better at multi-lingual work. Nisus is better for exchanging files with other users and publishers since it natively uses .rtf format, but Mellel uses a proprietary format. Nisus is a little bit more Word-like in implementation. Feature for feature, they are fairly comparable, with preference for one or the other being subjective.

[HandyMac]

"...especially for academic users, technical writers, and linguists." Make that some linguists. Several years ago, when Mellel was still in version 1, I asked if/when they were planning to incorporate support for South/Southeast Asian languages/scripts (such as Devanagari, Tibetan, Thai), and the company head told me that would be in version 2. However, as of 2.6 Mellel still doesn't include this support, an odd lack for a program that's always been touted for its multilingual features. It's great for Middle Eastern RtL languages (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), not surprising since it's produced in Israel, but useless east of Pakistan, or for scholars of Indic culture and religion (Buddhism, etc.).

For alternatives to Word, if you don't need/want Word's complexity, don't forget the free Bean, an excellent basic word processor based on TextEdit that's like WriteNow for OS X.

Another possible contender, first version just released at a discounted price, is Pagehand, which shows some very nice attention to interface refinement and typographical details (though little multilingual support as yet), and produces PDF files as its native output for trouble-free sharing (though not for collaboration -- but it can export in other formats).

[nweb]

You said: "For these independent-minded Mac OS X users, there are now a number of strong alternatives to Word, including Apple's Pages (), Nisus Writer (Pro or Express), Scrivener (), and Mellel 2.6.1, from RedleX."
Open Office (version 3.x) should have been included in this list.

[Gibbor53]

Mellel can also produce PDF versions of its documents (as I guess all Mac OS X programs can). PDFs of Mellel documents are nicely rendered and work well for sharing, but these are of no value for publishers unless the publisher simply prints the PDF as is. This holds true for all other PDF files derived from other word processors.

[Berend]

Two questions:
1. can Mellel do equations?
2. can it work with the excellent free and open source bibliography database manager BibDesk?

[tatilsever]

Gibbor53 said:

PDFs of Mellel documents are nicely rendered and work well for sharing, but these are of no value for publishers unless the publisher simply prints the PDF as is. This holds true for all other PDF files derived from other word processors.

I disagree. PDF files generated from within programs are not like scanned documents. The characters can easily be processed or simply copied and pasted. I remember submitting my paper in PDF format. It was written by means of Latex, but I did not have to provide the raw files. I doubt any publisher actually uses Word documents as is, so they must still be using some combination of scripts and some manual editing to get the formatting they want. If they don't want PDF, it is only because they did not put any effort into coming up with a workflow. Of course, that is no help if your publication of choice does not accept anything other than Word, but please do not make such sweeping proclamations.

[dreyfus]

Berend said:

Two questions:

1. can Mellel do equations?
2. can it work with the excellent free and open source bibliography database manager BibDesk?

1. No, but of course you can embed equations from e.g. OS X' included Grapher application (or various other tools), even in vector format.
2. It does support Bookends and Sente fine, there is no BibDesk support.

[dreyfus]

Gibbor53 said:

Mellel is an outstanding word processor. The greatest "con," however, is not the lack of this or that feature, it is the fact that Mellel has very little acceptance in the publishing world. This means that you will always be reformatting your texts to other formats (usually Word's .doc) in order for them to be accepted for publication.

Well, absolutely every publisher I know does accept RTF documents and Mellel exports them well (much better than the Word export). The bigger problem for technical publications is the lack of automated support for multiple ToCs (like table of contents, table of figures, list of tables, etc.) and automated index generation. I draft all technical documents in Mellel as it is fast and never crashes, but then I have to finish them off using Framemaker under Windows, as Adobe killed the OS X version and no existing OS X application handles index generation reliably when documents become very long (and I tried absolutely everything). Of course Latex would work, but I am getting too old for that :-)

[Gibbor53]

Well, if all you want to do is allow your publisher to cut and paste, you might as well send a document in .txt format. Of course someone can copy Roman text from a PDF, but many other types of formatting are lost if one tries that. Tables, different paragraph styles, non-Roman fonts, numbered lists, footnotes or endnotes, headers and footers, multiple columns, etc., cannot be easily transferred from a PDF to typesetting program, if at all. Few people want to do all the clean-up and reformatting that is needed. Trust me, there are many publishers that will not accept a PDF for submission of a manuscript, and with good reason.

[darthkt]

I used Mellel for months for my 236 page dissertation, and it NEVER CRASHED. Never. Simply uncrashable. Meanwhile, Word regularly crashes with a simple 3 page text document.
Nisus Writer Pro also started erratic behavior and crashing, hence I migrated to Mellel and was ever happy afterwards. The integration with Bookends is especially impressive: these two are the dynamic duo for academic writers.
Mellel has a learning curve, but it's so worth it once you get there. That said, I still have and use Word. Grrr.