explain Mellel to me

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soliphint
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explain Mellel to me

Post by soliphint »

Can someone help me? This is a serious question; I'm not being facetious. I switched to Mac about a year and a half ago. Since then, I've been vacillating between Nisus and Mellel. My question here is about Mellel. I really like its speed and its capabilities with Bookends.

However, it advertises itself as a word processor for academic and scholarly writing. I've written a few books and articles, and I can't figure out why I need to have complete control over every character, paragraph, etc. Theoretically, I can see it's a good idea. But I posted another question earlier asking how I might use keyboard commands to indent (Opt, Cmd, 0) and then "outdent" to the "normal" margins of the paper. As one who writes books, etc., this is crucial. The answers I received, with much appreciation for those who tried to help, tipped me off that things might be way too complex for someone who just wants to write books and articles.

So, am I missing something obvious, or do I need to learn a good bit about character styles, paragraph styles, etc. in order just to write a basic article? I would really like to know, as I am pleased with so much of Mellel, but I don't like getting into situations where character styles override paragraph styles, which override, etc., etc. so that I can't just write a basic article. As far as I know, from all the books/articles that I have read, you utilize one basic font (with maybe some Greek or Hebrew, in my field, which Mellel does well), you don't even think about changing paragraph styles, and you need to indent, to quote, outdent, to get back to "normal" and you need easy foonotes and biblio (which mellel does well).

I would love to know if I'm missing something, because I'd like to settle on one word processor. Thank you.
shades
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by shades »

Howdy. I began the switch to Mellel about four years ago, after 15 years with Word, and 5 years with Nisus Classic. Styles were the most difficult in mastering. But I must say that once you get the hang of styles, it is much better than Word's implementation, and makes writing very easy. I assign keyboard shortcuts to about seven different paragraph styles, and assign six basic character styles (i.e., Bold, Italic, Greek, Hebrew) for the F1 through F6 keys. And it is very quick, smooth, reliable, and second nature.

The combination of outlining, styles, footnotes, and auto-titling makes Mellel stand out from the others, and therefore my choice. I still occasionally use Word 2004 and Nisus Writer Pro, but for any consistent academic work, Mellel is the backbone.

To me, it was worth learning about styles, and setting up templates with styles. It saves time, energy, and frustration later on.
Rich
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mbywater
Got the auto-title mojo working
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by mbywater »

This is indeed a key question, isn't it? And you'll get as many answers as there are people on the forum, I imagine.

The thing about Mellel is its versatility. Not in the way that Microsoft Word is versatile, trying to be all things to all men but particularly to legal secretaries and middle management; but its versatility to writers.

Certainly Mellel offers you more typographical control than most word processors. And styles have their obvious benefits -- if you suddenly decide you want your body text to be in Goudy rather than Gill Sans a few simple changes will propagate that throughout your document. It's far more stable and has far fewer surprises up its sleeve than Word.

But the question is, why would one want that? I suspect you and I and many other Mellel users are in the same boat: almost everything we write is for publication in one way or another, and most publishers -- like the ones I was talking to yesterday -- say, when asked what format they'd like the manuscript in, "Oh, just RTF, please. No styles. Courier 12pt will do nicely."

In which case, I use my Very Simple Page Style, called "Dull". "Dull" has one text style -- Courier 12pt -- with three variations, italic, bold and underline. (The reason for using variations rather thand just hitting command-i or whatever, is variations persist whatever changes you do to the font. There are also just two Dull paragraph styles: Normal and Block Quote. Everything -- body text, footnotes, the lot -- is in Normal text and either Normal or Block Quote paragraph styles. Except for a second text style (OK, I lied) called "Red". "Red" is, actually, red, and used for the other note stream, which is Notes To Self.

That fits 90% of my writing needs.

But the other 10% is material for students, proposals for books and that sort of thing. For these, which aren't sent to publishers but either printed by me or sent to PDF, a more complex but consistent layout is required. Heading, sub-heading, titles, lists, captions: all those are in another page style called "Fancy". Yes, it took a little while to set up -- an hour or two -- but I have never had to change it and can write a document in Fancy without even thinking about its appearance for a moment, because it's all set up in the Page template.

There's another group, of course: people who write at length but don't send their work to publishers, publish it themselves, or have to submit to publishers (some journals do this) who have stringent formatting rules. My postgraduate days are long gone, but I'd rather write a PhD dissertation in Mellel than any of its competitors; again, once the styles are established, you can just ("just"?) write.

So the answer is: you don't need anything more than Dull -- you can set that up in fifteen minutes and use it for ever -- to do the vast majority of work destined for publishers. But it's very useful to have Fancy there when you want it. At least, that's my experience.
jannuss
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by jannuss »

Mbywater has summed things up nicely.

Here's another point of view that gets us to much the same place: I started with Mellel when it was the only game in town. Nisus was not available for OS X and WORD was out of the question [first the price and second the unfathomable complexity of the user interface].

My work is mostly letters, newsletters, and small booklets in Hebrew/English. For a long time, I did everything "ad hoc" from the palettes; didn't ever open the styles menus. Then, one day I decided to read the tutorial. What a revelation! I have now created a set of styles that met all my special needs. Recently I started using auto titles and tables of contents. When Nisus finally came up to speed, I checked it out, but come running back to Mellel.

My point is that Mellel functions wonderfully well on many levels: from the ignorant user who isn't even aware of all of the special features to those who understand and use every little nuance.

Janet
soliphint
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by soliphint »

mbywater wrote:This is indeed a key question, isn't it? And you'll get as many answers as there are people on the forum, I imagine.

The thing about Mellel is its versatility. Not in the way that Microsoft Word is versatile, trying to be all things to all men but particularly to legal secretaries and middle management; but its versatility to writers.

Certainly Mellel offers you more typographical control than most word processors. And styles have their obvious benefits -- if you suddenly decide you want your body text to be in Goudy rather than Gill Sans a few simple changes will propagate that throughout your document. It's far more stable and has far fewer surprises up its sleeve than Word.

But the question is, why would one want that? I suspect you and I and many other Mellel users are in the same boat: almost everything we write is for publication in one way or another, and most publishers -- like the ones I was talking to yesterday -- say, when asked what format they'd like the manuscript in, "Oh, just RTF, please. No styles. Courier 12pt will do nicely."

In which case, I use my Very Simple Page Style, called "Dull". "Dull" has one text style -- Courier 12pt -- with three variations, italic, bold and underline. (The reason for using variations rather thand just hitting command-i or whatever, is variations persist whatever changes you do to the font. There are also just two Dull paragraph styles: Normal and Block Quote. Everything -- body text, footnotes, the lot -- is in Normal text and either Normal or Block Quote paragraph styles. Except for a second text style (OK, I lied) called "Red". "Red" is, actually, red, and used for the other note stream, which is Notes To Self.

That fits 90% of my writing needs.

But the other 10% is material for students, proposals for books and that sort of thing. For these, which aren't sent to publishers but either printed by me or sent to PDF, a more complex but consistent layout is required. Heading, sub-heading, titles, lists, captions: all those are in another page style called "Fancy". Yes, it took a little while to set up -- an hour or two -- but I have never had to change it and can write a document in Fancy without even thinking about its appearance for a moment, because it's all set up in the Page template.

There's another group, of course: people who write at length but don't send their work to publishers, publish it themselves, or have to submit to publishers (some journals do this) who have stringent formatting rules. My postgraduate days are long gone, but I'd rather write a PhD dissertation in Mellel than any of its competitors; again, once the styles are established, you can just ("just"?) write.

So the answer is: you don't need anything more than Dull -- you can set that up in fifteen minutes and use it for ever -- to do the vast majority of work destined for publishers. But it's very useful to have Fancy there when you want it. At least, that's my experience.
These responses are all very helpful. I think what I need is the "Dull/Fancy" combo; I'm guessing those aren't transferable, so I'll need some initial help figuring out how to begin to "build" such things. Thank you.
soliphint
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by soliphint »

shades wrote: I assign keyboard shortcuts to about seven different paragraph styles, and assign six basic character styles (i.e., Bold, Italic, Greek, Hebrew) for the F1 through F6 keys. And it is very quick, smooth, reliable, and second nature.

The combination of outlining, styles, footnotes, and auto-titling makes Mellel stand out from the others, and therefore my choice. I still occasionally use Word 2004 and Nisus Writer Pro, but for any consistent academic work, Mellel is the backbone.

To me, it was worth learning about styles, and setting up templates with styles. It saves time, energy, and frustration later on.

Would it be possible to tell me how you go about assigning Greek character styles, then assigning the keyboard? I've tried it with the 'variations' list, bit it doesn't seem to type as Greek when I use it in a document, though it shows as "Character: Greek (D)" in the display in the middle.
joewiz
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by joewiz »

soliphint wrote:These responses are all very helpful. I think what I need is the "Dull/Fancy" combo; I'm guessing those aren't transferable, so I'll need some initial help figuring out how to begin to "build" such things. Thank you.
They actually are transferable - perhaps mbywater would e-mail the two style sets to you or post them somewhere where we could download it. I'd be interested to try the style sets as well!
matthias
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by matthias »

soliphint wrote: Would it be possible to tell me how you go about assigning Greek character styles, then assigning the keyboard? I've tried it with the 'variations' list, bit it doesn't seem to type as Greek when I use it in a document, though it shows as "Character: Greek (D)" in the display in the middle.
You don't need need another character style in order to use Greek letters. Simply toggle the keyboard layout to Greek. You do this in the menu bar. There is a small flag somewhere in the right corner. Click on it an chose the Greek flag. Now you can write away in Greek. The beauty with Mellel is that it will switch to a secondary fonts including Greek letters if the character style you work with does not have them. See the Mellel guide on pp. 282 for further details.
soliphint
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Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by soliphint »

joewiz wrote:
soliphint wrote:These responses are all very helpful. I think what I need is the "Dull/Fancy" combo; I'm guessing those aren't transferable, so I'll need some initial help figuring out how to begin to "build" such things. Thank you.
They actually are transferable - perhaps mbywater would e-mail the two style sets to you or post them somewhere where we could download it. I'd be interested to try the style sets as well!
I would like to see those as well; but maybe they're too difficult to share and merge?
mbywater
Got the auto-title mojo working
Posts: 22
Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2005 6:12 pm

Re: explain Mellel to me

Post by mbywater »

joewiz wrote:perhaps mbywater would e-mail the two style sets to you or post them somewhere where we could download it. I'd be interested to try the style sets as well!
Happy to do so when I get a moment. (I'm over deadline at the moment & I can hear publishers breathing heavily and keening in the night.)
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