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If it can open WriteNow or Appleworks documents then I'd like to know it.

HankTheCowdog wrote:If it can open WriteNow or Appleworks documents then I'd like to know it.

Short answer: no.

Long answer: Mellel can import "txt" "rtf" and "doc" documents only. You have to find a way to convert your WriteNow and AppleWorks documents into one of these formats.

I'm not familiar with WriteNow, but here's what I do with my old AppleWorks Files:
-- launch AppleWorks
-- select File/Save As
-- in the Save window I change the file format (lower left) to RTF; AppleWorks converts the saved file to RTF format
-- launch Mellel
-- select File/Import/RTF
done!

Note: you will probably need to do some cleanup on the new files . . . some small things may not come across exactly as you'd like.

Also note: spreadsheets created in AppleWorks can we treated similarly by saving them in EXCEL format. Both NeoOffice and Numbers can read XLS files.

Janet

Not even newer Apple applications can do that!
Janet described the best method, i.e. using Appleworks.

Cattus Thraex wrote:Not even newer Apple applications can do that!
Janet described the best method, i.e. using Appleworks.

Not exactly true. At least iWork ’08 can open AppleWorks documents directly. AppleWorks text files could be opened with Pages, AppleWorks spreadsheets could be opened with Numbers and AppleWorks presentations could be opened with Keynote without the need of any file conversion. I have only opened some old text and spreadsheet files and it worked flawlessly (but those files didn’t contain very complex things).

Thanks. My wife has longed to use her writenow word processor program. She says that there is no other one as easy and fast to use.

I am new to this forum. I have many Mellel files on the MAC using OSX. Can they be opened on the PC using Microsoft word or any other word processor?

ifi wrote:I am new to this forum. I have many Mellel files on the MAC using OSX. Can they be opened on the PC using Microsoft word or any other word processor?

Ifi, many of the same answers we gave to Hank apply to your question: Mellel can export "txt" "rtf" "doc" and "OPML" documents. You have to pick the format that best suits your needs [probably rtf]; export the file; transfer it to the PC, then import into WORD.

Many of us use rtf files to work with colleagues 'on the other side.'

Janet

HankTheCowdog wrote:Thanks. My wife has longed to use her writenow word processor program. She says that there is no other one as easy and fast to use.

I understand your wife. I've long loved WriteNow, for how easy and elegant it was. You might be interested, however, to know that TextEdit is a scaled down version of WriteNow, so maybe your wife could feel comfortable with it.

I think the modern incarnation of WriteNow is Nisus Writer Express. And I'm sure the next version of Mellel will be the new vision of Word 5.1a for nowadays: powerful, complete, elegant...

Paolo

ptram wrote:And I’m sure the next version of Mellel will be the new vision of Word 5.1a for nowadays: powerful, complete, elegant…

…featuring Duke Nukem Forever built-in :)

zoul wrote:

ptram wrote:And I’m sure the next version of Mellel will be the new vision of Word 5.1a for nowadays: powerful, complete, elegant…

…featuring Duke Nukem Forever built-in

I would be happy with Duke Nukem Forever alone!

Let me sharpen my previous question. Say I have a Mellel document stored on a transportable memory device. At the moment I have no access to a MAC OSX and Mellel. Is there a way I can now open this document under these conditions?

ifi wrote:Let me sharpen my previous question. Say I have a Mellel document stored on a transportable memory device. At the moment I have no access to a MAC OSX and Mellel. Is there a way I can now open this document under these conditions?

At the moment, no. There is no program other than Mellel that can open its native document format. If transportation and access on non–Mac OS X systems (or OS X systems that do not have Mellel installed) is a necessity for you, then exporting to RTF would be your best solution—nearly every word processor can open RTF.

(Just beware that if you use Word to open and edit the RTF, it may add extra features that other word processors do not understand—Microsoft controls the RTF format, and it changes with each release of Word/Office, to give it some level of feature–parity with Word's own native format.)

Maybe we should push for something like a portable Mellel for such a device. I think Papyrus--another small WP--can run off a flash drive or whatever. That would be sweet.

shmulik wrote:Maybe we should push for something like a portable Mellel for such a device. I think Papyrus--another small WP--can run off a flash drive or whatever. That would be sweet.

This is a possibility, however, you would need a license for every computer that you run Mellel on. (Also, I haven't seen anything in the Papyrus site that indicates it is able to be run from a portable drive and usable on multiple systems with a single license.)

The inability to easily create a portable version of Mellel, though, is not necessarily because of the Redlers. The OS X preference system makes it difficult to use workarounds. I just tried an experiment of using both aliases and symbolic links to store the actual preference file and application support folders in a different location than the standard. However, it does not work. With an alias, Mellel will simply overwrite the alias with a fresh default preference file. With a symbolic link, it will read the original preference file, but then overwrite the link with an actual file, killing the link to the original.

There will need to be some create workarounds on the Redlers' part to make a portable Mellel a reality, and personally I'd rather have their energies spent on adding features and refining Mellel.

ifi wrote:I am new to this forum. I have many Mellel files on the MAC using OSX. Can they be opened on the PC using Microsoft word or any other word processor?

Shouldn’t it be possible to open and read the xml file anywhere? You have to unzip the xml and then open it in a text editor / word processor. That way you would always have access to the text (and the images) in the file.

And shouldn’t it also be possible to use the HTML converter that someone wrote to transform the MelXML into HTML?