Discussing Mellel

Hello Mr. Engst,

I wanted to comment on a few things in your insightful section about word processors on Mac OS X.

All the following comments are written, of course, from my biased point of view as one of the creators of Mellel...

>There is no WriteRight, and, speaking as a professional writer, >with thousands of articles and numerous books under my belt, I'm >comfortable saying that the Macintosh world doesn't have a word >processor that's designed for writers.

Here I beg to differ. Mellel, as we claim on our site, is meant specifically for writers. We're not there yet -- I'm not trying to pretend we are what we're not yet -- but this is the target, plain and simple. As you'll see below, we're already doing many of the things a writer needs when working (not including our search capabilities and our auto-save which, frankly, suck).

>just imagine the on-deadline call from your editor saying that >figure references need to be in the form "Figure 1.2 - Caption >text." and every figure reference in the 12 files that make up your >350-page book uses the previous requirement of "Fig. 1-2: Caption >text.". With Nisus Writer Classic, I could make that change >throughout the entire book in a few minutes; with any other >program, it might be hours of error-prone manual labor.

That should take about 5 seconds in Mellel. Just open the Numbering Flows sheet, click "Figure" and change the Free Text element from "." to "-". Click OK and you're done.

Since all the captions you insert are auto-numbers, and auto-numbers come in setups, one change to a flow in the setup will change the figure auto-numbers throughout the document. Further, imagine that your editor wants "Figure 1.2 - Caption text" to change to "Caption text - Figure 1.2"... This is the real nightmare scenario, because with any word processor the Caption text (title) is not a defined element and therefore cannot be re-located. With Mellel it is and it will require seconds to change this (by dragging the Title element of Figure) to wherever you want it).

>Outlining.... As with so many other features, Word's outlining >tools have the right idea, but suffer significantly in the >implementation.

As you will see with Mellel 1.8 -- our outline tool will try to remedy this. Our approach would be completely different from MS Word's in one essential sense: instead of working in an "outline mode" or "view" the outline would accompany you while writing, displayed in a side pane (instead of the customary top-bottom division in outliners) so you'd be able to see the structure and what you're writing at the same time.

>WriteRight should provide revision tracking, extra-textual >commenting, and collaborative editing, and it should write files in >a format that can be read without loss of information in Word, >InDesign, QuarkXPress, and other common word processing and layout >programs.

I would add "conditional text" (as with FrameMaker). Quite essential when re-purposing text for different types of output.

>And One File Format to Rule Them All -- Microsoft Word controls the >word processing market for two reasons. First, as we've seen, it >offers more useful features for serious writers than any other word >processor, and even badly implemented or buggy features are often >better than nothing. Second, and more important, the Word file >format has become the lingua franca of word processing >documents.... WriteRight must not only read and write Word >documents, it must use the Word file format in as close to a native >fashion as possible. Realistically, that probably means RTF, though >it will need to at least convert Word files from .doc to .rtf >format without losing anything.

To put it bluntly -- RTF is probably the worst thing that can happen to a word processor. It's worth than death -- It's ongoing, agonising misery and then death.

From our experience as the only word processor on Mac OS X list who had to tackle this format face-to-face (NWE and Mariner are using a free source utility called WvWare to do that) I can tell you that RTF is the most bizarre, arcane, confused and confusing format that ever existed. It's no wonder that even MS Word sometimes gets baffled and opens a document you've saved differently or not at all.

But being cryptic, badly written and old is not the worst part about RTF -- much worse is the fact that if you use RTF you are forced to *think* RTFishly and be limited by what it can and cannot do. If you want to use tables, for example, it is almost impossible to use RTF as the format and have a more sensible data structure of your own for those. If you need to read and write 5 different types of table line endings, write the relevant either at the beginning or an end of a row, or both, or none or somewhere else, trying to keep two different ways of thinking at the same time will become so hard that you'd succumb to using the RTF way, for the detriment of your users. And things get even worse when you want to create something new or innovative. Different streams for notes? Forget it. Auto-number objects? Go primitive and prosper. Built in bibliography support? There's no such thing. Page style? Not here. More efficient tabs? Uh-ah! Live Editing? Bi-directional paragraph layout? Global styles? List styles? Auto-number styles? Note styles? RTF doesn't have words for all those, so you'd better forget about it.

RTF may be the lingua franca of word processing, but once you adopt it you pretty much have to create an MS Word clone and, essentially, write yourself off as a word processor. If you do everything the same and, limited by RTF you can't do that better, what's the use of using your word processor?

>>just imagine the on-deadline call from your editor saying that >>figure references need to be in the form "Figure 1.2 - Caption >>text." and every figure reference in the 12 files that make up >>your 350-page book uses the previous requirement of "Fig. 1-2: >>Caption text.". With Nisus Writer Classic, I could make that >>change throughout the entire book in a few minutes; with any other >>program, it might be hours of error-prone manual labor. > >That should take about 5 seconds in Mellel. Just open the Numbering >Flows sheet, click "Figure" and change the Free Text element from >"." to "-". Click OK and you're done.

That's wonderful, but here's the next question. My editor wants this change, I make it, and now I need to give them files that conform exactly to their requirements of being in Word format, with specific styles. Do your auto-numbers export over to Word properly? As static text or as Word field codes? What if I need to change one once I've exported?

And, in the real world, what happens when I need to start the next edition of my book, and final copy editing has been done in those Word files? How do I get those back into Mellel, complete with all styles, and turn the auto-numbers back on?

>>Outlining.... As with so many other features, Word's outlining >>tools have the right idea, but suffer significantly in the >>implementation. > >As you will see with Mellel 1.8 -- our outline tool will try to remedy this. >Our approach would be completely different from MS Word's in one >essential sense: instead of working in an "outline mode" or "view" >the outline would accompany you while writing, displayed in a side >pane (instead of the customary top-bottom division in outliners) so >you'd be able to see the structure and what you're writing at the >same time.

That's a bit like Word's Document Map, which is useful, but damnably ugly and hard to use. And if it allow rearranging of items, it could be great.

By the way, I seriously recommend that you talk to Matt Neuburg about mimicking MORE's capabilities. If you do that, there's a whole community of outliner geeks who will flock to you.

>>And One File Format to Rule Them All -- Microsoft Word controls >>the word processing market for two reasons. First, as we've seen, >>it offers more useful features for serious writers than any other >>word processor, and even badly implemented or buggy features are >>often better than nothing. Second, and more important, the Word >>file format has become the lingua franca of word processing >>documents.... WriteRight must not only read and write Word >>documents, it must use the Word file format in as close to a >>native fashion as possible. Realistically, that probably means >>RTF, though it will need to at least convert Word files from .doc >>to .rtf format without losing anything. > >To put it bluntly -- RTF is probably the worst thing that can >happen to a word processor. It's worth than death -- It's ongoing, >agonising misery and then death.

Gee, don't hold back, tell me what you really think. :-) Seriously, from a design and elegance standpoint, I agree entirely. From a real-world standpoint, I don't have any better suggestions.

>From our experience as the only word processor on Mac OS X list who >had to tackle this format face-to-face (NWE and Mariner are using a >free source utility called WvWare to do that) I can tell you that >RTF is the most bizarre, arcane, confused and confusing format that >ever existed. It's no wonder that even MS Word sometimes gets >baffled and opens a document you've saved differently or not at all.

What's Apple using now, do you know?

>RTF may be the lingua franca of word processing, but once you adopt >it you pretty much have to create an MS Word clone and, >essentially, write yourself off as a word processor. If you do >everything the same and, limited by RTF you can't do that better, >what's the use of using your word processor?

So what's the solution for the real world, where you have to be able to trade documents around with other people who probably don't use the same word processor?

and simple. As you'll see below, we're already doing many of the things a writer needs when working (not including our search capabilities and our auto-save which, frankly, suck).

To put it bluntly -- RTF is probably the worst thing that can happen to a word processor. It's worth than death -- It's ongoing, agonising misery and then death.

But being cryptic, badly written and old is not the worst part about RTF

His personal preferences of for one of Mellel's competitors, but the review is fair and worth reading.