Overall, this is a great app. There are only 2 things I would like to suggest improving ...
1. the cursor behaves erratically. Very difficult to control using the keyboard and it dances around all over the place.
2. When adjusting the width of table cells, could it leave other unrelated and unconnected tables untouched?
Exports great to MS word format.
Hurray! After more than a month of waiting Mellel 5 has finally arrived here on MacUpdate! Still, it's such a wonderful word processor that is surely worth waiting for. I just wonder why some applications take so long to show on MacUpdate. Would anyone from MacUpdate please tell us the reason. Thanks.
Today (Jul 6, 2020) "Mellel 5.0" saw the light of day. It'll hopefully be released here soon. It's a great leap forward especially if you are dealing with ePUB and can also export its documents with great ease and precision to Microsoft Words Open XML Format. I upgraded with closed eyes because I've been using Mellel for many years on end and it has always kept its promises on developing new features continuously. This is a masterpiece in software engineering especially for those you like me who write in RIGHT-TO-LEFT languages and need those special features to handle texts correctly. Highly recommended.
Mellel and the Mellel/Bookends combination are first rate for writers, especially for those with complex documents. The 5.0 version is a landmark for Mellel because it now exports accurately to Word and ePub.
FYI Mellel 5.0 was released yesterday, July 2, 2020.
https://www.mellel.com/blog/mellel-5-0-released/
https://www.mellel.com/release-info/5-0/
Free if your existing license (Mellel 4) was purchased less than two years ago. Upgrade price if Mellel 4 license was purchased more than two years ago: $29 (regular full price $49). Mellel Educational License $39.
For me meanwhile the best word processor. Fast - not very big - reliable - and updated if any error occurs. A big thanks to the developers: thank you so much for this grat program.
I was checking on other applications and just had to see how my favorite word processing program was being treated in the ratings and comments, and rate and comment myself. Let me say this: As a professional researcher and writer, if Mellel were ever to disappear, I would be devastated. I've been using it for over ten years now and can honestly say that, for serious writers (especially those who need to use non-Latin characters a lot), there is no better program. Combined with Bookends and it's exquisite. Even with massive manuscripts, it's very fast. It never hangs, or pauses, or moves slowly through a document. One can have a two- or four-page viewing. One can easily use (and label!) various colors of highlighters. Then there is the outline pane, with autotitles, that helps me move quickly through the documents and keep my conception of it clear. Tracking changes and posting comments is also super-easy. Then there is the great index feature. Why do people even bother with other programs. I truly adore this program! I can't say enough good about it!
Mellel has always been my favorite wordprocessor and Mellel 4.2 has notably enhanced its “table” features. Its developer is dedicated to make it better and better. He listens to his customers’ suggestions and carries them out without fail. What is so great in this process is that he doesn’t charge extra fees for all his hard work. All these significant changes occure in abosolute silence and unlike some other developers the version number doesn’t jump from 4 to 5 in a matter of a month or two to oblige customers to cough up more for the new version and all features that were missing before. This what I like about this developer and his work. His support is second to none and his application runs smoothly on all Macs. What do we need more?
After an early assessment of Mellell I think it is quite good although I am yet to discover how to bold, underline etc. The way to those basic enhancements is not obvious to a new user.
When I opened my Mellel 3.5.x in the last week of August 2017, I was told that Mellel 4.0 was available as a free update within the limits of my current license. So I installed it, whereby my 3.5.x version was deleted, and the 4.0 version told me I would have to pay an upgrade price. I was quite surprised and felt deceived. I had to look several places to get back to 3.5.x, because Mellel would not make the download link public:
http://forum.mellel.com/viewtopic.php?t=3392
I finally got hold of the Mellel_35501.dmg, which I will keep in a safe place. This is the latest 3.5 version according to this overview:
https://www.mellel.com/release-notes/
However, when I recently checked for updates inside Mellel 3.5.5 I was offered 3.5.6 as a final update for pre-4 users. So I am happy with that, but unhappy about all the hassle I went through.
I eventually paid the upgrade price for Mellel 4, but that's another story.
I don't write without Mellel. Well, sometimes I do, but I don't like it. For any serious writing, I run back to Mellel. Add Bookends for academic writing with references, and OmniGraffle for diagrams, and productivity soars.
The screen shot on MacUpdate is misleading. Mellel does not do mathematical typesetting. To create such a screen shot requires additional software, specialized equation typesetting. The equation is made in the external program and when it is pasted into Mellel it is treated as a picture--there is no line-breaking for inline math, no opportunity for breaking a large standalone math across a column width, no adjustments made on pagination, etc. It's just a picture. Same is true for most other word processors except LyX.
Mellel 4 is a major upgrade of an already excellent app. It is a great program for serious writers. Mellel is fast and doesn't crash or become corrupted. It handles complex manuscripts easily. Dealing with scholarly references (via the bibliographic program Bookends) is exceptionally good, as is the automatic numbering of sections, figures, etc., and cross referencing (e.g., "See discussion on page 14", where the page number adjusts automatically as necessary. Some new features, such as indexing and story-sketching, are quite welcome. Although I don't benefit, its multiple-language features are apparently terrific. Mellel now has a web site with examples of how to do things. The on-line manual is good and will sometimes be necessary because Mellel is "different" and because some features are sophisticated. Negatives? It can be tricky collaborating with users of Microsoft Word, but track changes works well if one exchanges documents in rtf (see manual).
Are the following statements about Mellel still true?
• No intelligent placement of figures and tables—they are merely treated as giant characters and must be placed manually.
• No native support for math. External editors can handle standalone equations but inline math is a giant character and thus prone to rude line breaks. Also, has the long-ago baseline error been fixed whereby one had to manually adjust math baseline to match surrounding text?
Between the time when the update screen popped up, with a note saying it was a free update with my licence, to the time I downloaded it and installed it, something changed and it suddenly became a paid update. Time Machine to the rescue.
Today I bought version 4.0 with closed eyes! If you wonder how this can be I would answer: "after long years of using Mellel and its powerful features of handling multi-lunguage functions which are what I need, I've come to the conclusion that there's no other word-processor that comes close to it". The new version has tons of enhanced functions that you'll notice as soon as you open the application for the first time. Software engineering at its best. Fariborz Amirshahi- Verona (Italy)
I own both Mellel and Nisus Write Pro and they are both excellent when dealing with large , complex multilingual documents. I just can't make my mind up on who is the better !
It's one of the best writers I've ever used, and used a plenty (MS Word, Pages, NeoOffice, Open Office, LibreOffice, TexEdit, Bean). It's stable, reliable, consistent and quite powerful. It can do things that others can't like preserve formatting of certain web pages when brought over to a document format. I could wish for a better (covering more topics) Help and some features made easier accessible (column formatting, language setting) with the help of tool buttons but all this doesn't change my opinion: it's an excellent piece of software
Looking forward to better table support, for those of us who rely on table rich documents. A long time request ... With that we can return to using Mellel after having to rely on Pages in recent years - whose table support is much (much) better.
A couple of months ago I finished my PhD thesis. The document contained many images and tables. I used Mellel for writing and Bookends for reference management and I did not have any trouble. Both applications are very reliable.
How is table creation and management in the latest Mellel?
It was awful a few years back. Improvements were promised but never materialized.
Has this critical part of Mellel been overhauled finally?
If so, I can return to using what was my favorite document creation tool.
How is table creation and management in the latest Mellel?
It was awful a few years back. Improvements were promised but never materialized.
Has this critical part of Mellel been overhauled finally?
If so, I can return to using what was my favorite document creation tool.
I am also an academic, thus a professional writer. Whatever its GUI, it is truly the best word-processing program I've ever used, especially with its seamless interaction with Bookends. I've been writing with it for almost ten years now and never have had any trouble. I never use other word processors, unless I have to.
Mellel works very well on long, long documents, and it does not crash. In my experience, the minimalist plain text writing tools are actually less stable and more frequently abandoned by their developers. I appreciate the fact that Mellel's files are not in a package format because I find that makes managing conflicts in Google Drive or Dropbox more feasible.
I've been using Mellel for years and really appreciate the free of charge updates!
It's also very well written stable software.
I've yet to find a perfect word processor program for mac but Mellel Is at the top of my list.
Gosh, as I recall, it is about time for Mellel to fundamentally improve how tables are created and managed. Please tell me this once planned overhaul iOS finally on course for completion.
Poor table management caused me to ditch Mellel long ago, despite its many other good features. Creating and managing 30-tables in a 150 page document is a real pain. Not for long, I hope.
Good:
- One of the best word processors available for OS X. Mellel is rock solid (it seems to never crash) and it has great features for writing long documents (like TOCs, change tracking, comments, cross references) but some features also need impovements (tables...) or still need to be implemented (captions...).
- The new comments feature works very well.
- Support is fast when bugs are discovered and reported.
Not so good:
- Support is sometimes slow when asking questions or making feature requests.
- Version 3.3 introduces an usage tracking feature which is on by default. That means that the first chunk of data is sent before you can disable this „feature“. The „anonymised“ usage data is sent to „Google Analytics“. To disable the tracking: Select the „Privacy“ entry from the „Help“-menu and deselect the checkbox there. Because the text of the privacy information is located on the internet it could change any time.
The only thing I dislike with Mellel, is that the typography is so ugly. In justified alignment you get the same white spots between words like you would get with MS Word. And characters are stamp-like, not adjusting their position to their neighbours… This is really sad, as we have actually system wide beautiful typography on the Mac (even with TextEdit). Or can this be somehow adjusted? Nisus uses the standard Mac text engine, so the output looks much better than with Mellel…
I've been using Mellel for its right-to-left script capabilities since its first release. Although there are now many word processors that handle correctly unicode but I still prefer Mellel because of its indomitable stability. I once wrote a 600 page book in Persian and didn't face a single issue for months on end. Opening such a hefty document was very fast and saving new modifications was a snap. If you like me need to entrust your documents to a reliable word processor then look no further. Fariborz AMIRSHAHI - Verona (Italy)
Been using Mellel for years as my backup word processor and it is great. Style sets are really nice to have and exist throughout the program. Character sets are the same way. Integration with footnote apps is smooth, so this makes it good app for scientific research papers and the like.
Why oh why can't _somebody_ on this planet make a word processor that intelligently place graphics instead of treating them like giant characters? There is exactly one program for the Mac that can do this, and it it LyX, a front end for LaTeX. How hard can this be? A person can do this manually but then must do it over and over again whenever text is added or removed. If a person can do this, then a program can be made to do it too. FullWrite Professional did this in 1988-1998, but that is ancient history. Not Microsoft, Not Redlers, not Nisus, not Apple—no one (but LyX). This is just madening and inscrutable.
I recently started using Mellel for those times when I need to use a word processor as opposed to a pure writing tool such as Scrivener. When I open it, it starts up, unlike Word which churns for seconds trying to figure out how to get open. That saved time alone makes it worth some money. I found the customer support dismal, however. When I couldn't find the reason for a difference in behavior (missing "Save As" menu option) between my Lion machine and my Mountain Lion machine, I emailed support and got a confused reply from someone who clearly hadn't read my question. Writing to ask again yielded nothing, and two more attempts to get any response were futile. I googled and it found the answer. Expect no help from the developers.
Mellel is really good but the reason I stick with Nisus Writer Pro is the GUIs. They are nearly equal in terms of capabilities but Mellel's non-standard UI pushes me away. I want to like Mellel as I think it's slightly better but until they update the UI I will stay with NWP.
Download is still labeled as the BETA version. This is also true if you download 3.2 directly from the developers site in spite of various notices that this is the final version.
I like Mellel but I use Nisus Writer Pro primarily because Mellel's GUI is a little too non-standard. Kind of like Graphics Converter (e.g. best-in-class app but bad GUI) until the make over.
I found this nice app while looking for an alternative to Microsoft Windows.
Don't get me wrong, MS Word isn't a bad program. But it isn't made for writers, at least not for the kind of writers who love to write.
Why would I say that?
When I started using MS Word on Windows I was very happy with all the styles and choices this program gives you.
And most of the time I had to write something for school I ended up fiddleing around with those styles and borders and buttons instead of doing what I should do: just write.
The same happend when I tried Pages on Mac. Pages is beautiful but it has problems with simple tasks like making a table of contents. Or adding foot notes.
And this is where Mellel surpasses its competitors.
Compared to other text processors Mellel opens really fast. Even if you open a 20 pages file with pictures and references in it, Mellel opens in an instant.
The most notable thing to see when you first open a new document is a palette on the right side with a ton of features. Most of the time I see palettes I am somehow overwhelmed but not with Mellel. Everything is in a logical order and very easy to find.
The same goes for the user interface. It is very clean and not overcrowded with buttons. Like most word processors today, Mellel has spell checking, too. But it doesn't underline the wrong words, it marks them in a light red. This is much easier on the eyes and doesn't stop you from writing.
Mellel gives you control over the look of your documents. You choose how your documents look like and not the other way. All the settings are very easy to find and intuitive to use. I never needed the help file as I found everything I was looking for very quick.
Mellel comes with its own file format, .mellel, but you can export your documents to MS Word format, plain text, rtf or pdf.
I totally recommend this program to everyone who is looking for a nice, very fast and powerful word processor.
