Mellel 6 released (Mac only)

Posted by Amontillado
Dec 20, 2023 at 12:34 PM

Absolutely agree on the suitability of XML. That’s what Mellel uses, too.

XML also makes for what probably amounts to an open format, or at least it should.

SoftMaker’s word processor is said to be very faithful to Word. I’ve never owned the product, so I’ll have to defer to others.

There is now a free version of SoftMaker at http://www.freeoffice.com. I might have to give that a try on my Linux box.

MadaboutDana wrote:
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…