Mellel appears to have gotten a lot stronger today, not that it was a weakling to begin with. Real docx export appears to be supported along with epub. Mellel isn't an island any more.

It's never the best to be an early adopter, so I waited about 15 minutes before I bought the upgrade. Tonight I"m going to plow into it and see if it's going to become my creative writing tool of choice. I still wish the Compact View was more like Nisus's Draft view or Word's Web view, but I may be able to get over it.

Nisus may still be required for life, since I use mail merge frequently. I'm not certain if the new Mellel supports mail merge.

Other features in the release notes that I'm looking forward to evaluating include timeline support.

First glance, it looks nice.

Well, take me with a grain of salt when I get giddy. I thought I saw a mention of timelines in the release notes, but I think I hallucinated.

Looks like Mac only.

https://www.mellel.com/

LB wrote:

Looks like Mac only.

https://www.mellel.com/

Yes, that's true, I should have mentioned that. There is a nice IOS version, too. With a Bluetooth keyboard, Mellel is a good mobile word processor.

I'm eager to play with styles, which took a little learning curve in earlier versions of Mellel. You have global style sets, available for any document. When you use a global style set, it gets copied into the document so the document is portable.

I need to relearn Mellel's style system, but it's a rich resource. You get styles for characters, paragraphs, lists, tables, pages, and sections. Character styles get sub-styles, so you can change a sub-style and alter the way adornments like underlining are represented.

I've been very happy with the way Nisus handles styles, but have always wished for page styles. Mellel does that.

Best of all, like Nisus and unlike most modern software, it's documented.

Mellel probably isn't for everybody. It's complex enough to warrant a 500 page manual, although you can just fire it up and type.

I'm just happy to see it improving, and delighted to see (finally) docx and epub support.

$29 for the upgrade is more than reasonable.

Looks solid, if a bit antiquated. The ToC-as-outline isn't bad at all

https://www.mellel.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/outline620.png

https://www.mellel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/m5-header-2000.png

although that's essentially how I've been been using Ulysses for a couple of years.

Ulysses is great. I used it for a while, and its IOS app is one of the best. It's one of the few IOS companion apps that isn't feature-limited.

Markdown is cool.

Mellel is a totally different animal. I figure if there's a tool I can live with for creative writing that supports things like cross references I need for documentation I write, I might as well use just one tool.

I think the main reason I got away from Ulysses is I wanted to get away from iCloud for document syncing. I prefer the Chronosync app and an encrypted thumb drive.

No doubt, though, Ulysses is very nice.