Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

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GMB
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Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by GMB »

I'm a neophyte academic type, and want a good Mac wordprocessor for my dissertation and work. I have Bookends right now, and like it fine. I also have Pages, which seems pretty good; but from what I see on the site, Mellel may be better.

What advice might you have for me? Why might Mellel be a good idea?

Thanks.

GMB
jannuss
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by jannuss »

For anyone using Right-to-Left languages, Pages is a no-go.

Janet
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by Reiner »

here you can find a test of some Wordprocessors (German): http://www.apfelwiki.de/Tests/WordAlternativenTest
Reiner
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by Timotheus »

For a dissertation Pages certainly isn't the best choice. Just to give an example: Pages isn't able to produce footnotes which span across two pages.
moineau
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by moineau »

I know someone who did its dissertation with Pages : so obvisously, it's possible.

But if you want the best program for the job, your only choice is either Mellel or Word.

Problem is with Mellel, you can't do a name index as for now. Word can. It's the only major deal breaker to me. Also, there's no such thing as "The Missing Manual" for Mellel, you have to figure out a lot of things by yourself, or using the forum. But for the rest, it's really great.
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by jannuss »

moineau wrote:there's no such thing as "The Missing Manual" for Mellel
There's no "Missing" manual, because there are several "found" ones:
-- Mellel video tutorials and tutorials for beginners at http://www.redlers.com/supporttutorials.html plus
-- the Mellel Guide at http://www.redlers.com/download.html

Janet
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by simifilm »

moineau wrote:I know someone who did its dissertation with Pages : so obvisously, it's possible.

But if you want the best program for the job, your only choice is either Mellel or Word..
For everything above 100 pages, Word is no option, at least if you care about your mental health.
moineau
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by moineau »

simifilm wrote:
moineau wrote:I know someone who did its dissertation with Pages : so obvisously, it's possible.

But if you want the best program for the job, your only choice is either Mellel or Word..
For everything above 100 pages, Word is no option, at least if you care about your mental health.
I dutifully respect the Mellel creators for their work, and I expect a lot from the program - in the future. As for now, Word is the only software that does it all. I'm using Word 2008, and I don't have any problem with my 1100 pages dissertation.

Mellel appears very promising, even if the learning curve is pretty hard. You have to manage every single option to get it right.

And no, there's no "Missing Manual" for Mellel, it was discussed before. A video tutorial is not a manual, a guide is not either. The manual made by a user is good, but it lacks the clarity of a David Pogue.

And like I said, Mellel is on the right track, but a lot of things are still missing. Indexing, automatic capitals, spaces between quotes, ?, !, and words (à la Word), for French users, etc.

So please, let's be a little bit honest before bashing Microsoft because it's so fashionable.
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by rpcameron »

moineau wrote:I dutifully respect the Mellel creators for their work, and I expect a lot from the program - in the future. As for now, Word is the only software that does it all. I'm using Word 2008, and I don't have any problem with my 1100 pages dissertation.

Mellel appears very promising, even if the learning curve is pretty hard. You have to manage every single option to get it right.
This is quite true, but I feel is part of the appeal of Mellel. I enjoy having full control over the presentation of my documents, and having settings that remain consistent. In my experience, this has not been the case with Word. While Mellel's learning curve is steep, once an afternoon is invested for determining your settings, future changes and modifications are easy. Mellel requires a slight paradigm–shift in the way you think of a word processor and its styles—however, I feel this is a shift in the proper direction.

Also, as far as Word being a program that "does it all", you are absolutely correct. As such, that is perhaps Word's downfall: it attempts to be all things to all people. I feel that Word attempts to do too much, and therefore falls short in its execution.
moineau wrote:And no, there's no "Missing Manual" for Mellel, it was discussed before. A video tutorial is not a manual, a guide is not either. The manual made by a user is good, but it lacks the clarity of a David Pogue.

And like I said, Mellel is on the right track, but a lot of things are still missing. Indexing, automatic capitals, spaces between quotes, ?, !, and words (à la Word), for French users, etc.
While Mellel does lack a "Missing Manual" type of book (David Pogue is perhaps one of the greatest technical writers out there), it is not quite necessary. While the myriad of options available in Mellel do make it difficult to learn at first, I don't feel that such a book is a necessity. Don's tutorial is quite an excellent resource, Mellel's manual is fairly comprehensive and the users on the fora are very responsive and helpful (if at times opinionated).

As to Mellel's lack of things "missing", some of these are conscious omissions and ought to remain that way, I believe. Features I despise in Word are its automatic capitals (for the beginning of sentences, I assume you to mean) or any of its other "automatic" settings, especially those relating to spelling or grammar. True indexing is something that is best left to a dedicated program—a concordance–type of functionality would be nice, though. (While I do agree with you about the missing automatic insertion of non-breaking spaces before punctuation marks is annoying, hopefully it will be improved when a proper language meta level is implemented. However, because this language level has yet to be implemented, the lack of locale–based settings such as these is very understandable.)
— Robert Cameron
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by aechallu »

I actually love Pages. I use it for letters, quizzes, and anything that involves back-and-forth collaboration with word users. I typically use Pages to comment scholarly work. I was surprised that Pages did such a good job with a 380-page dissertation that I just read and commented.

I don't use Pages for my own academic writing because it lacks outlining, highlighter, and bibliographic management. But I find that pressing Command-I for italics (and not losing the format if I change styles) is so liberating that I may switch :)

Mellel and Pages are not the only options for long-document writing. You also have:

1) Scrivener. It's a different concept. It is for drafting, not for design. And it has perhaps the most loyal userbase I've ever seen.
2) Nissus. Mentioned very frequently in this and Scrivener's forum.
3) Openoffice and neooffice. The good thing here is Zotero, collaboration and ODF.

AC
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by moineau »

aechallu wrote:I don't use Pages for my own academic writing because it lacks outlining, highlighter, and bibliographic management. But I find that pressing Command-I for italics (and not losing the format if I change styles) is so liberating that I may switch :)
You got it nailed. Mellel is a great software-to-be (for us French academics, there's several things to implement), but it is somewhat less flexible than Pages or even Word because if you wish to make a simple change like italics or bold, if you want that to be kept, you have to go to Chracter style, then to variation (or have a shortcut like F3, but on a standard Mac keyboard those keys are already used for other things), then change to italics or bold, which is kinda reinventing the wheel to me.

I think the best thing to do is to use several word processors :
1) Pages for light work, short pieces. But for longer Work it's apparently possible too, since it manages tables of contents (but no index) EDIT : Pages manages automatic capitals, changes quotes from " to «, you can put auto spaces between words and punctuation marks... In fact, Pages is very-very intuitive, all the opposite of Mellel : compare Mellel's inspector with Pages inspector, especially the styles modificator, a very nice innovation.
2) Scrivener to create a longer piece from scratch if you don't have a worksheet already : you manage yor work as a collection of small pieces of text, and do what you like with them. A really great tool.
3) Mellel for articles or books with a lot of footnotes and complex pagination, if you're the tweaking kind of guy who likes to control everything.
4) Word to do the index or everything, but the main problem is that it's not very light a program. Mellel is very good on that, since it is so light ! No bugs since I have it.

I actually did buy Scrivener, Word, Mellel and Pages to compare them all and use'em all. I didn't have Nisus, since it looks just like Word and is not especially designed toward academics.
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by TomEck »

moineau wrote:
...(for us French academics, there's several things to implement), but it is somewhat less flexible than Pages or even Word because if you wish to make a simple change like italics or bold, if you want that to be kept, you have to go to Chracter style, then to variation (or have a shortcut like F3, but on a standard Mac keyboard those keys are already used for other things), then change to italics or bold, which is kinda reinventing the wheel to me. ...
I will not participate in this futile discussion but why you are not simply solve your "French academic problems" by your own? It is simple to set up all the shortcuts you like to have with Spark (freeware), Keyboard Maestro (shareware) or iKey (shareware, but buggy on OS X.5). Just assign Cmd-Shift-I or Crtl-Shift-I (whatever you prefer) as an F2 keystroke (and so on) for Mellel only and your wish is fulfilled. Even your wish to "put auto spaces between words and punctuation marks" you can fulfil easily by setting up ONCE your preferences... The latter you can also achieve by using TypeIt4Me, Textexpander or Typinator, for example...
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by moineau »

TomEck wrote:I will not participate in this futile discussion but why you are not simply solve your "French academic problems" by your own? It is simple to set up all the shortcuts you like to have with Spark (freeware), Keyboard Maestro (shareware) or iKey (shareware, but buggy on OS X.5). Just assign Cmd-Shift-I or Crtl-Shift-I (whatever you prefer) as an F2 keystroke (and so on) for Mellel only and your wish is fulfilled. Even your wish to "put auto spaces between words and punctuation marks" you can fulfil easily by setting up ONCE your preferences... The latter you can also achieve by using TypeIt4Me, Textexpander or Typinator, for example...
This, my friend, is not an answer. First off, if you don't want to participate in this "futile" discussion, then don't post.

Second remark, why in the world do i have to buy a zillion of third party software to do simple things that Word already does ? Why ??? Just to use Mellel ? I don't want, in fact i know no person with the slightest sanity to learn a zillion of guides of different softwares, spend tons of hard earned cash for software that very soon has to be updated because the main program has been ugraded !

People like me want a program that is superior to Word, i.e., that is fast and stable, and designed for the scientific work. A program that takes the best from Word and makes it even better. That's all.
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by simifilm »

moineau wrote:
simifilm wrote:
moineau wrote:I know someone who did its dissertation with Pages : so obvisously, it's possible.

But if you want the best program for the job, your only choice is either Mellel or Word..
For everything above 100 pages, Word is no option, at least if you care about your mental health.
So please, let's be a little bit honest before bashing Microsoft because it's so fashionable.
I don't bash Word because it's fashionable, I do it, because I know Word extremely well.
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Re: Mellel vs. Pages...who wins?

Post by Mart°n »

moineau wrote: This, my friend, is not an answer. First off, if you don't want to participate in this "futile" discussion, then don't post.
As Tom only liked to offer a currently available solution to your problems, there is no need to tell him not to post.
moineau wrote: Second remark, why in the world do i have to buy a zillion of third party software to do simple things that Word already does ? Why ??? Just to use Mellel ?
As mentioned above: To get the features you need. Now. In fact, Tom mentioned one or two tools not a zillion one. And even if you buy all of them, you only have to spent half the price compared to Word.
moineau wrote: I don't want, in fact i know no person with the slightest sanity to learn a zillion of guides of different softwares, spend tons of hard earned cash for software that very soon has to be updated because the main program has been ugraded !
Everyone who likes to do his job best uses the the tools that work best. If I look into my Applications folder, I’ll find over 150 tools inside and I have used every single one of them and I have used them because they are the best to do a specific job, the way I like and with the result I like. A single software is not able to do all those things with the same ease of use and the same quality output. You shouldn’t use a hammer to drive a screw in (even if this may be possible). Also, the tools mentioned work with every software underneath so they are neither bound to Mellel nor do you need to upgrade/update them when Mellel will be updated. A global “execute a comand if a key combination is pressed” could be used with Mellel, Word, Mail, Safari a every other application you like. Also a general “put a space and a question mark into this text if I press the questionmark key” could be used with all tools you like. This way you could insert a space before a question mark in Mellel, Safari or Firefox and achieve the correct French typography in all applications. But you shouldn’t assume that this is correct typography in other languages too. In English sentences all punctuation marks are written directly after the last letter of the word!
moineau wrote: People like me want a program that is superior to Word, i.e., that is fast and stable, and designed for the scientific work. A program that takes the best from Word and makes it even better. That's all.
As you may have read on other posts in this forum, there are several reasons why you won’t get what you want. First, there are other Mellel users with other wishes. As not all wishes could be packed into one software, the Redlers have to make some decisions of which feature to put in and which to keep out. As a lot don’t like auto correction features, you may see them late or never included into Mellel. Therefore Tom suggested to use a additional tool to satisfy your needs now. Second, the developers of Mellel are only two, three or slightly more people who won’t be able to compete with the large group of Microsoft developers that work on Word. Therefore you may have to wait one two or five years until a requested feature will be added to Mellel. So if you like to use it now and you absolutely need some features like the one mentioned above, the additional tools are a good way to go.
Third, as of the limited time and resources, the developers may only want to integrate features that are absolutely necessary inside Mellel and that could not be added by an external tool. The lately added cross references feature – for example – is hard to work around so that need to be integrated into Mellel. Some key-combo-tools or auto-correction tools that are only requested by a minority of the users and their effect could be achieved by a cheap addon, may reside at the bottom of the long list of requested features. Again, if you need a feature now and can get it for 10 to 20 Euros, most people probably would jump on that horse. Your mileage may vary.
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