[Berend]

[quote name='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.

1. Ok, but how about automatic numbering and referencing of such objects, etc?
2. Mellel: 50 USD, Bookends: 100 USD. Pricy combination.

[Berend]

[quote name='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 :-)

Sorry. I just can't resist the temptation. You're never too old too learn.

Ok, LaTeX has a steep learning curve.
I have been doing LaTeX for approx. 20 years.
I maintain a software reference manual of more than 350 pages with toc and index, a user manual of 250 pages with toc and a very extensive index. And other manuals: all quite large with indices.
All done with LaTeX. Never a problem. Blazingly fast. It just works.

And LaTeX on the Mac: MacTeX is the best TeX distribution I have ever encountered.

Maybe you should have a look at LyX (http://www.lyx.org)(also available for Mac OS X):
not wysiwig but should make LaTeX much easier to use.

[dreyfus]

Berend said:

1. Ok, but how about automatic numbering and referencing of such objects, etc?
2. Mellel: 50 USD, Bookends: 100 USD. Pricy combination.

Well, it's not automatic, but every inserted object can have a title and a cross-reference target ID, so you can automatically generate stuff like "see -title- ... on page -page-" where the title can of course include a number. Alternatively you can automatically number captions for images/equations and reference those captions instead, which is more comfortable IMHO.

Yep, Bookends is pricey, I agree, but also really powerful. I got my copy for almost nothing with one of these MacUpdate bundles, but knowing it now, I would also pay the full price for it. Can't say how it compares to the free alternatives though.

[harryhoffner]

This is not intended as a knock on Mellel: I actually am a registered licensee of Mellel, Nisus Writer Pro and Word. My needs also may not be your needs. I am an academic, and I write academic articles and books requiring use of Hebrew, Arabic, etc. As everyone knows, Word for Mac currently does not support right-to-left written languages. So I am limited to Open Office, Nisus Pro or Express, or Mellel. I’ve never tried Scrivener. Nisus seems to me to have all of the features that are useful to me in Mellel. When I cite textual variants, I need to renumber each pericope separately anyway, so automatic numbering is unnecessary: I can do it manually without any fuss. For others such multiple note flows might be a great advantage. Two things Nisus and Word do that Mellel doesn’t do yet, are hyperlinking to information on the Web and hyperlinking to other files on your hard drive. Nisus also has the ability to search for and change all characters or words in your text in a given script (i.e., Hebrew, Arabic, Greek; not font or language). In Mellel you can do such a search only if you know the specific font. If you don’t know the particular Hebrew or Greek font the term is styled as, you will not find or change it. And since I need those features, I currently use Nisus Pro instead of Mellel for my articles. You might prefer Mellel after trying both, and obviously you should. Demos are free.

Another gentleman here reported crashes with NW Pro. I have used it for years and never experienced one.

[tatilsever]

Gibbor53 said:

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.

My publication asks for figures and tables on separate pages, apply the same style to every paragraph, asks for documents to be submitted in single column draft style, but publishes them in double columns. I have no idea how they handle equations from PDF. To be honest, I've never thought about it. In any case, how does Word help unless the authors submits a perfectly formatted paper. There must be some manual interaction necessary anyways. I am fairly sure they don't use Word for the actual publishing anyways.

[folklore]

dreyfus said:

Yep, Bookends is pricey, I agree, but also really powerful. I got my copy for almost nothing with one of these MacUpdate bundles, but knowing it now, I would also pay the full price for it. Can't say how it compares to the free alternatives though.

Bookends is alright, but I much prefer Sente (which Mellel also supports). Sente's UI is much, much better, and the new(ish) output style editor in Sente is flippin' awesome. I actually have licenses for both Bookends and Sente - I switched to Sente when I couldn't format a custom output style the way I wanted to in Bookends.

And folks, a good reference manager is worth every penny of $100 or $200 - if you're an academic type. I have every article I've ever read in Sente, including custom keywords, notes, PDFs, etc. It's damn cool. I wouldn't have passed my comprehensive exams without a tool like Sente or Bookends.

I'm thinking about doing my dissertation in Mellel, but I am concerned with submission formats. I'll have to check with my university to see what they require. I'm afraid they might require dissertations submitted in Word format. And if that's the case, I'm probably better off using Word instead of dealing with translation issues.

[web]

I haven't looked at Mellel in a long while, but will try the demo again. I'm surprised that it is getting compared to Word when it appears to have been designed to mimic FrameMaker's feature set (to some extent). I was surprised that only one person in the comments mentioned FrameMaker. I was (long ago) led to believe that the authors of Mellel intended it to be a refuge for FrameMaker users, and I do have some hope that this may come about. As a long-time FrameMaker user I need a refuge. I'm still going along with FrameMaker in Classic on PPC Macs, but it's soon time to upgrade and I'll lose my much loved FrameMaker. I've been playing with LaTeX, but it's a lot of work compared to FrameMaker's way of doing things. TeXShop is quite good if you have to go that way, but Textures may be a viable alternative as well. I don't know what I'm going to end up moving to, but it won't be Word.

- web

[baffone]

And why not mentioning OpenOffice, a free alternative, improving in each new version?

[tramannoni]

There is a deal if you buy Mellel together with either Sente or Bookends. Look in their web site.

[tramannoni]

My experience with Nisus is different, since the only time it crashed on me (and I use it everyday) was when using one of the earliest beta. I would say reliability is not a concern when comparing the two best alternative wordprocessors for the Mac.

[Yodalogger]

Mellel is a great word processor but it handles images poorly. There are rumors of improvements for version 2.7 but until it gets better, it doesn't do the trick for me, an academic writer that needs to place figures into text documents.

[laup]

Yodalogger, on 04 August 2009 - 01:46 PM, said:

Mellel is a great word processor but it handles images poorly. There are rumors of improvements for version 2.7 but until it gets better, it doesn't do the trick for me, an academic writer that needs to place figures into text documents.

Mellel 2.7.1 is now out. I don't know what image problems were being referred to earlier, but I use large numbers of images in my writing. No problem that I'm aware of. I normally insert .png or .pdf files, but Mellel will also take OmniGraffle files and transform them automatically. With 2.7.1, there are additional options such as having text wrap around the image, with the image on either the left, right, or center.

[laup]

folklore, on 22 June 2009 - 04:51 PM, said:

dreyfus said:

Yep, Bookends is pricey, I agree, but also really powerful. I got my copy for almost nothing with one of these MacUpdate bundles, but knowing it now, I would also pay the full price for it. Can't say how it compares to the free alternatives though.

Bookends is alright, but I much prefer Sente (which Mellel also supports). Sente's UI is much, much better, and the new(ish) output style editor in Sente is flippin' awesome. I actually have licenses for both Bookends and Sente - I switched to Sente when I couldn't format a custom output style the way I wanted to in Bookends.

And folks, a good reference manager is worth every penny of $100 or $200 - if you're an academic type. I have every article I've ever read in Sente, including custom keywords, notes, PDFs, etc. It's damn cool. I wouldn't have passed my comprehensive exams without a tool like Sente or Bookends.

I'm thinking about doing my dissertation in Mellel, but I am concerned with submission formats. I'll have to check with my university to see what they require. I'm afraid they might require dissertations submitted in Word format. And if that's the case, I'm probably better off using Word instead of dealing with translation issues.

Aside from pdf, Mellel will also export to .rtf, which can then be opened in Word. The result is not perfect, but it's good. I would think that the worst "translation problems" would take hours to fix--not nothing, but hours rather than days. I just did an experiment, importing a rtf version of a 200 page technical Word document with figures, equations, tables and text. I then exported back to rtf again, and reopened in Word. Nearly everything was fine, but some formatting was wrong and some tables with images inserted into cells or colored cells didn't come out right. This was a pretty tough case and I believe I could fix everything in 4-5 hours. For a more typical document, the problems would likely be minimal. THus, your conservatism is warranted, but the risk would not be too great.