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Mellel 6 released (Mac only)
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Posted by Lucas
Dec 16, 2023 at 02:46 PM
@Steve, I’ve only tested this with basic documents, but PanWriter, as a front end for Pandoc (both of which are cross-platform), seems to do a good job with importing Word documents and automatically converting them to Markdown.
(Overall, I have found that PanWriter/Pandoc have improved over the years and also gotten easier to install. I installed Pandoc on my Mac using Homebrew.)
Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 16, 2023 at 08:18 PM
Satis wrote
>Upgrade price is $44.99
Interesting. In my instance of Mellel 5 the price is shown as $49.95—probably some A/B testing of price sensitivity. Doesn’t matter. I like Mellel, and as others have noted it earnestly fills an RTL niche and others, but not, for me, at either quoted price.
Posted by Dormouse
Dec 16, 2023 at 09:17 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
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
Not sure why you’re forced to use Word. Presumably you have a docx file which you could open with any Mac-friendly WP like Mellel. idk why a writer would be mucking about with layout directly rather than using styles which would be a one click change; I assume they are at least using headings and one of the outline modes. And Word is happy to save as .txt if you only want the text.
Personally I spend very little time in ribbons or menus, but like most things - including plaintext editors - it can be complex if you are unfamiliar with it. The difference with most (all?) plaintext editors is that any feature you are looking for is almost certainly available and it’s just a question of knowing how to activate it. Certainly it’s not an easy program for occasional dabbling unless you are trying to implement a common standard workflow.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 19, 2023 at 10:08 AM
Well, anyone working with corporate clients more or less automatically has to use Word. Over the years, I’ve tried replacing Word with other soi-disant Word-compatible apps (StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, SoftMaker Office…), but have inevitably come across issues with all of them (although I’m in the process of taking another look at the latest version of SoftMaker Office).
And yes, Word is infuriating. As it continues to evolve, new bugs continue to crop up. I’m currently having problems with one of the most basic functions, Search, which is ridiculous. And you can’t comment on headers or footers, or on footnotes. Which is also ridiculous. It also has a nasty way of suddenly crashing out completely, which is actually quite impressive – very few apps crash out as thoroughly as Word, but Microsoft does at least follow up with a rather appealing little “Sorry about that” message.
But at the end of the day, it’s the industry standard. It shouldn’t be, just as VHS shouldn’t have been the standard for video cassettes back in the day. But here we are.
Ah, when I look back at the joys of using WordPerfect 5.2 on MS-DOS – I remember writing an entire manual for some Atari music composition software on that, complete with multiple columns, box-outs, headers, footers, table of contents, index, and all sorts. Oh, and the computer I used was a Toshiba laptop (TS1000, I believe) with a battery life in excess of one hour. No Internet back then, of course; we all used CompuServe or (if we were very cutting-edge) Yahoo. I was a bit of a WordPerfect demon. Goodness, how time flies!
Dormouse wrote:
>
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>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
>
>Not sure why you’re forced to use Word. Presumably you have a docx file
>which you could open with any Mac-friendly WP like Mellel. idk why a
>writer would be mucking about with layout directly rather than using
>styles which would be a one click change; I assume they are at least
>using headings and one of the outline modes. And Word is happy to save
>as .txt if you only want the text.
>
>Personally I spend very little time in ribbons or menus, but like most
>things - including plaintext editors - it can be complex if you are
>unfamiliar with it. The difference with most (all?) plaintext editors is
>that any feature you are looking for is almost certainly available and
>it’s just a question of knowing how to activate it. Certainly it’s not
>an easy program for occasional dabbling unless you are trying to
>implement a common standard workflow.
Posted by Amontillado
Dec 19, 2023 at 12:58 PM
I hear you, but there is still a reason writers turn to Scrivener, Ulysses, Markdown editors, and other text handling tools like pandoc.
The goal is to write. The tool should be a background item. For my uses, Mellel does what I need and I like the way a Keyboard Maestro macro can make it a single click to pare the UI down to nothing but a box to write in. it’s like a single click swap between a simple text editor and a word processor with a lot of features.
Like Mellel’s own advertising used to say, it’s not for everyone. For me it’s awesome, but I sense my mileage varies.
MadaboutDana wrote:
Well, anyone working with corporate clients more or less automatically
>has to use Word.