Forum

There's some great ideas already, but what I would also like to see are...

- improved management of styles for true facing page printing, e.g., a style (that maybe used for the beginning of a chapter) must start on an odd page. Other people elsewhere have expounded on what additional options might be necessary.
- the use of autotitles inside table cells
- MUCH, MUCH better table handling e.g. splitting, breaking (or not) over pages etc
- the ability to easily see what autotitle level a particular title is at.
- the ability to select multiple objects in the title flows dialogue box and assign the same paragraph and character styles to all items at once
- better use of the outliner function, with drag and dropping and maybe also hoisting, like Omni Outliner
- split screen and multiple windows of the same document are a must
- what about a window that could be called up that shows you what your current settings would produce in a Table of Contents. So, you could pull up this window, and even make changes there (to the styles, for instance) and this reflects exactly what your TOC will look like. Then when you are happy with it, you simply choose to insert the TOC.

I am sure that there are many others, but that will do for the moment.

Danoz wrote:There's some great ideas already, but what I would also like to see are...

- improved management of styles for true facing page printing, e.g., a style (that maybe used for the beginning of a chapter) must start on an odd page. Other people elsewhere have expounded on what additional options might be necessary.
- the use of autotitles inside table cells
- MUCH, MUCH better table handling e.g. splitting, breaking (or not) over pages etc
- the ability to easily see what autotitle level a particular title is at.
- the ability to select multiple objects in the title flows dialogue box and assign the same paragraph and character styles to all items at once

I fully support these request and would like to add one more in this regard:
- Better handling of footnotes: Right now, when combining several columns text with one column text, footnotes are not put at the end of the page but at the end of the respective section. This can result in footnotes being put in the middle of a page.
This should be rectified so that footnotes will appear at the bottom of the text/end of pages/end of document (as set in the footnote prefs).

In the hope that this isn't all of us whistling in the wind, I vote for

-- Leopard Spotlight co-operation (showstopper for me; I've had to put Mellel on hold pro tem.)
-- QuickLook visibility
-- Change tracking
-- Direct Save As... to .doc or at the very least .rtf
-- Versioning
-- End of chapter / end of section notes.
-- Improved implementation of Outlining; the right-clicking is tiresome & keyboard controls are badly needed.
-- Text flow around graphics
-- DevonTHINK readbility/import
-- Fix footnote problems
-- Better implementation of tables
-- Cross-referencing
-- Clickable hyperlinks in PDF output.

Indexing doesn't bother me because I do it externally (in Cindex) when required, but I can see how its absence upsets a lot of people.

Mellel is still the best & most stable WP out there, in my opinion. But there are some areas where it is lagging. I'd love to see it catch up and overtake the competition on those few weak spots.

DanZac wrote:of course, I forgot that one. Split screen view!

++ on that!

One more that I posted about years ago and remembered today trying to write an exam.

An improvement to numbered lists, namely, the ability to put list numbers of different levels on the same line, so that you can have:

1. a) Explain the meaning of life.
b) Prove the universe is triangular.

At present you have to put the 'a)' on a separate line from the '1.' (or number the questions manually).

1.
a) Explain the meaning of life.
b) Prove the universe is triangular.

It's even more noticeable if you want:

1. a) i.

rather than:

1.
a)
i.

By the way, does any word processor do this right? I suppose you can do it in LaTeX.

To be more precise about wishes for communicating with Word, I would include a very high priority on being able to import and export preserving style and style names. It would seem to me possible to have an interface in which one specifies all of the Mellel styles on the left (those used in the document), and the Word styles one wants to use on the right (assuming that one is familiar with Word and has created all of those styles (or chosen them from the styles of an organization's standard template). Then the export to Word, via rtf as appropriate, could do the replacements. Or vice versa.

I would like Mellel to present the fonts in the way TextEdit presents them, and as they are in FontBook.

It is very difficult to manage a list of sometimes hundreds, and may be more, fonts, to which, if you do not recall well, and I don't, you have no idea how is their face. It is important that the user, at least for me, will be able to choose the font according to the classification one does in the FontBook.

raymond wrote:
It is very difficult to manage a list of sometimes hundreds, and may be more, fonts...

raymond, there are already loads of simple, readily available solutions to your font selection problem. I've included some of them below:

FontDoc - freeware
"FontDoc, a very simple program which shows you all of the fonts on your system using any text and any size you choose."

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24912
===
Font Pilot - 15.95

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15899

===
And here you'll find loads of freeware, shareware & commercial font utilities:

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/qs.ph ... &submit=Go

Thanks for these proposals.
They are not useful as the presentation of fonts as it is done in TextEdit.
I wish mellel will present them in this way, at least as an option

My one request (well, it's easy to limit it to one, since others have covered many other desiderata):

Column headers/footers and numbering (similar to page numbering), so that layouts where a column functionally represents a page can be headed, footed (?), and numbered accordingly. In other words, if I set up a two-column layout that represents facing pages, each column might have a "page" number in its own header or footer, and footnotes in that column.

When I look at the wish list there are apparently two types of wishes:
a. Features that make life easier but for which there may be less comfortable work-arounds, and
b. Features that are simply missing in Mellel and are badly needed.
I would prefer the Redlers to concentrate on type b wishes, especially:
1. Cross refs
2. Indexing and
3. Text wrap around images.
And I would love to have an answer to the wish list from one of the Redlers, who have become silent again on the forum for some time now.
Hans-Reinhard

Hans-Reinhard Koch wrote: And I would love to have an answer to the wish list from one of the Redlers, who have become silent again on the forum for some time now.
Hans-Reinhard

You may want to refer to the following threads, Hans-Reinhard:

http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1441

http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1444

2.5 is in alpha testing according to a post by Ori; so we will hopefully see a beta emerging with some of the new features requested.

With the negative reports about Office 2008 coming out, I'm anxiously awaiting Mellel 2.5.

Thanks and praise to the Redlers, looking forward to 2.5.

My requests:

• true language modes at the level of character style/variation, which would handle spellcheck, typographic features, etc.
• variable width columns; in general, better columnar functions.
• ability to separate footnotes with a tab, rather than a carriage return for the purpose of fitting multiple short notes ([3] Ibid., 267 [4] Ibid., 272 [5] Ibid., 290) on the same line.

...my desperately needed features:

- Full import/export of "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications" (e.g. used in OpenOffice as .odt) as an ISO certified standard for document exchange,
- cross references and textflow around images of course,
- and a splitscreen-feature of course...

I agree that improved columns in Mellel would be a great improvement. I have often wished for simple layout functions like variable-width columns and columns that flow from one page to the next so as to allow for images in the column opposite. Hope that this can be incorporated into an upcoming version.

Thanks.