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Mellel 6 released (Mac only)
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Posted by Amontillado
Dec 14, 2023 at 05:41 PM
Mellel 6 has been released. It’s been through a fairly long beta cycle and has been extremely solid for me.
Anyone looking at Mellel for the first time will likely get befuddled by Auto-titles.
I think they are cool, though. Instead of applying a heading style to get a heading in the table of contents, you apply an auto-title.
It works the same way, except the auto-title includes features to turn on chapter and section numbering and also bundles style settings for running headers and footers, cross references, and other uses of headings.
Global and local style set operations have been smoothed out in version 6.
It’s also no longer available in the Apple App Store. The developer got tired of Apple’s cut and Mellel mysteriously disappeared from Apple’s writer apps list.
Since it’s not Word, you probably need to know you want Mellel to be aware of it. Maybe being in the App store isn’t necessary.
Mellel is by far my favorite writing tool. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 15, 2023 at 07:14 PM
$49.95 upgrade. Seems steep, especially since very good free options exist.
Posted by satis
Dec 15, 2023 at 10:11 PM
Upgrade price is $44.99
I used version 2.x around 15 years ago, and was satisfied with its speed and features compared to Word, which I hated using. Mellel has always been an outstanding word processor for technical writing and dissertations. Paragraph styles are linked to a character style, but you can still tweak a character style to selected text without changing its registered paragraph style. Story elements can be tagged and color-coded, and Story View lets you add metadata to story elements.
From its inception it’s had multilingual support and handled bi-directional text, which is why it’s always been popular for writing in Arabic and Hebrew.
In the Mac space its competition has always been Nisus Writer Pro, whose sale and upgrade pricing is the same. (And they also sell a stripped-down version called NisusWriter Express, for $26.)
The market for word processors has collapsed with the explosion of text/Markdown processors, which are sufficient for most users, and by the dominance of MS Word (required for authors to share track-changes with publishers) and Apple’s free Pages in app form and on the web. Word processors have become a niche product whose expected features (thanks to Word) tend to culminate in app bloat and a cluttered UI.
Posted by Dormouse
Dec 15, 2023 at 10:57 PM
I don’t think markdown editors have had much to do with the collapse of the market for word processors.
Some of it is the move to the web and digital and that most people - and even businesses - have a much reduced need for printing. And half the design of a word processor is based on printing.
Part of it is the rise of competent free word processors - Docs and Open/Libre Office.
And some part is due to the dominance of MS Word.
A part of that is the gradual improvements in Word from a writing point of view. I now do my formal writing in Word, which I have never done prior to this year. I don’t know when it’s features hit the point where I would have considered it adequate or preferred, but I spent years wondering why so many writers didn’t use something better. I’ve also found that David Hewson (writer of books about Scrivener and Ulysses) has made the switch too - https://twitter.com/david_hewson/status/1529463722565058561 .
Other programs might - but usually don’t - work as well and the ubiquity means that I can rely on any collaborators having access to it, and, since it is the format I have, there’s never a point when I have to convert to meet the final stage requirement of having it in docx format.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 16, 2023 at 11:33 AM
I am sometimes forced to use MS Word, and everytime I do I think, “could they have made this any more user un-friendly?” I can usually figure out what I need to do, but navigating the ribbons and menus and dialog boxes is the stuff of nightmares. I don’t use it enough for any of that to become second nature.
I work for a publisher, and wear many hats, that includes design and layout of the books. I’d much prefer getting the manuscripts in plain text. Word encourages authors to try to do their own layout, which I then undo when I pull the text into InDesign. It’s a waste of their time and makes more work for me.
Sorry, this is a bit off the track of Mellel.
Steve