Mellel 6 released (Mac only)

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 20, 2023 at 10:45 AM

Just to pick up on a couple of points made by @Dormouse:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the alternatives to Word are all worse – just that they’re not all totally, 100% compatible with Word. And because Word is what my clients use, I have to use it for their work, ensuring that what I produce is 100% compatible with what they want.

For my own personal writing purposes, I don’t use Word. In fact, it is refreshing not to have to go anywhere near it. While I acknowledge that it’s a hugely powerful piece of software, it is also (as you effectively remark) an aggregate – a conglomeration of features piled one on top of another. This is true of all MS apps, in fact, which is why they’re all so enormous (ca. 1GB each). This has obvious implications in terms of efficiency, and probably explains peculiarities like the impossibility of adding comments to e.g. headers, footers, text boxes etc.

For what it’s worth, I’ve only ever had a couple of crashes with Obsidian, and that’s with about 34 plugins enabled ;-) But I’m a comparatively recent convert, and from what I’ve seen, it’s being improved all the time.

In my experience, Word on Mac isn’t that much different (in its current form) from Word on Windows (yes, I do use both, the Windows version in a Parallels virtual machine). The Windows version does have a couple more features (especially with regard to VBA scripts, which is the only reason I run it in a VM), but otherwise displays many of the same infuriating characteristics as the Mac version. Neither of them is particularly prone to crashing, but when they do, oh boy do you know it.

I will say this: Microsoft’s XML file format is vastly more efficient than the various Apple formats used in Pages, Numbers etc. The files from these iWork apps are always enormous, whereas even a large Word document takes up very little space (depending on the graphical content, obviously), largely because it’s massively compressed. Other apps like SoftMaker Office – which I like very much – also produce highly compressed XML files; if I was 100% confident in their reproducibility in Word, I would swap over to SoftMaker Office like a shot. LibreOffice is quite impressive, but suffers somewhat from a similar aggregative approach to Word.

I’ve tried Mellel and other excellent writing apps (Papyrus Writer, for example), but don’t have sufficient reason to use them for my own personal writing work, which is mainly done in Obsidian or Scrivener or increasingly, Lattics (which, despite some annoying traits, is peculiarly satisfying to use). I can see situations in which I would definitely use Mellel, not least because of its awesome indexing capability. But I haven’t produced my own Definitive Work yet, and I don’t need that kind of power to produce articles, blog posts etc.

I’d forgotten WordPerfect was still a thing. Might have to check it out as well…