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Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2013 4:15 am
by tika-tika
This is a fair assessment. I agree with the rock-solidness of Mellel. The formatting customisation is also unparalleled. I am part way through a document that already has 305 autotitles... I have to say that it is ridiculous to try to make a cross reference with the flat list of autotitles. I think I have mentioned in another thread that some sort of layering or searching would be useful here. I have four levels of subtitles, tables, figures, and images. If the autotitle type could replace "reference type" in the cross-referencing dialogue, that would be a great start. Then, if the numbering of the autotitle could show up with the title itself, that would be super.... that way, I could mention>Tables> Table X.

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2013 6:31 am
by GediWorrier
Dang, I knew that I had left something important out. I agree with the frustration of finding the cross-reference. A nested list of auto-titles would have been much better.

Of course, once in place, the cross-references in my thesis were rock solid and 100% reliable.

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2014 11:54 pm
by timofcanberra
I would like simpler cross referencing - either the dialog box could be redesigned so that auto titles are sub-grouped as figures, tables etc or a search function in the dialog box - I have 570 autotitles in my PhD and getting the right one to cross reference is really frustrating. Being able to sort the results would help in this respect. I also agree about static TOC - my supervisor will not even look at my work if it does not have correct TOC - in word it is also hyperlinks so she can jump to the section she wants to read. Tables I just do not use in Mellel - I compose in Indesign and paste as graphics - time consuming but gives me the control I need.

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2014 2:49 pm
by ulrich_ulisses
Totally agree with what is mentioned here so far. I am currently writing my PhD in developmental biology and I have a lot of tables (around 13 already in my material and methods) and its really annoying not being able to make them breaking automatically in a appealing way. I tried to prevent them from splitting using the keep line together controls with no success. A repeating header would help a lot already. Not being able to set an equal cell hight bothers me.
I also find it hard to find the cross-references and since I have a lot of figures and tables with similar content and the naming of all that things gets more and more confusing. Working with figures is also not a pleasure. I managed to make captions that stick to the picture but setting the caption width is problematic. There is a lot of text usually under my figures explaining what you see there and the figures vary in size i.e. they do not alway occupy the complety page width. There is no way to tell captions to mirror the figure width, since the auto-title caption "has no idea" that it is used in company with a figure. Also, in order to make the captions stick to the figure I had to put the figures in a paragraph environment which causes the next ugly thing, that if you let the text flow around the picture and put the picture to the left or right side there will be an empty line break that is part of the image's paragraph (see the screenshot in this link to a dropbox download). Another thing I would like to be different is the usage of the screen space. Since the document in the view is always centered I cannot zoom it in a size that i could if it would be just next to the structural flow window. Why are the learned words for the spell checking not included in the saved file? I am working at home and in the office and hypenation and learned words always differ. An index would be indeed helpful and nice but is not the most important thing right now i guess.
And just in order to not sound so ungrateful here:
The structuring of the document is a bless. I love how I can just grab a complete section and shift it somewhere else. Auto titles and cross-references work like a charm. Building a library with Bookends works perfect. The kerning is beautiful! The palettes are fast responding and logically ordered. Really like the comment function and marking thinks in my text that still need to be fixed or changed.
So in the end I think the most important thinks for an upgrade would be figure captions (for a big range of scenarios). More table options including table styles. Own styles sets for auto-titles. With this I wanna finish and am really looking forward coming Mellel versions. (I would not complain about a paid upgrade btw. if making these changes possible requires some more money…)

tables: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5420426/tables.pdf
figures: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5420426/figures.pdf

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 7:06 pm
by raymond
I am glad you have successfully finalized your thesis with Mellel. Using Mellel with L2R languages creates less compatibility problems with the other "side" namely Word users on PC, the majority of users.
When writing in Hebrew the problems are more presenting, and bringing many Mac users to utilize Parallels and Office suite on their machine to reach appropriate compatibility with the other "side".
One more problem, not receiving any appropriate response from he redlers, is the disappearance of the ability to spell check mellel Hebrew files when the mac is with Yosemite. Since Yosemite, with Mellel last version ,the Hebrew spell checking has been disappeared on my Mac at least, and at the same time the speller for other L2R languages works fine.
In these conditions it is difficult to even think of papers or thesis written in Hebrew in Mellel.

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Sun Nov 09, 2014 8:58 pm
by raymond
Gedi,

You wrote: "made checking for orphans easy"

Can you elaborate more about how you did identify these orphans

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2014 3:58 am
by tika-tika
shades wrote:
GediWorrier wrote: You could define a Page Style Break so that it would always begin on the odd page.
I have never been able to figure out how to set a page style to always start on odd or even. Please explain how you would do this- it would be a big help.

Thanks

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2015 3:57 pm
by farcas
For academic writing, especially with dissertations and monographs, I'd like to add my hardy agreement with the feature requests/improvements:

better auto-titles
better (organized) cross referencing
index feature
live ToC with hyperlinks (in PDF export especially)
table styles

Status on any of these?

Thanks!

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 10:17 pm
by dr.cox
I can only second all feature requests for scientific writing. I was hoping to replace Latex with Mellel as I am not in need of the heavy formula editing and really like the live bibliography. However, there is much lacking (table flowing over more than one page, TOC features, captions that are fixed to figures, images, objects, etc. ) and essentially everything the thread owner and discussion participants requested. More than three years have passed and some of that stuff still hasn't made it into the program.

Support from mellel is great with quick replies, can't fault them for that. But the amount of tinkering needed for basic needs is almost as much as in latex which is much more powerful.

hope things evolve before I have to pay for the next version.

Re: Writing a PhD in Mellel

Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2017 9:49 am
by Stefan Green
Have not some of the requests in this thread been met with the release of Mellel 4? For example index function?