A few ease of use/feature requests

[SDempsey]

I'm getting more comfortable with Mellel now, and I must say that overall I'm loving it! Here are a few suggestions/requests that might be of interest.

No sub/superscript keyboard shortcut by default. I have manually set some shortcuts, but the application of sub/superscript is such ubiquitous need for technical writing that it seems a default button/keyboard shortcut is warranted.

The ability to select multiple, noncontiguous sections of text. In most programs holding the command key while making selections allows one to do this. Personally I use it to select multiple (separate) numbers in a chemical formula, then apply subscripts to all of them at once. It is of course useful in many other circumstances as well. Is there another key that I'm missing?

I've seen this request before, but I'll make it again. Implement some method of tying figure captions to their figures so that they are always close together.

For page margin settings, for the top and bottom margins, you can change the distances from the bottom edge of the page to the footer and from the footer to the page margin. Without changing this the current approach, the very simple addition of an extra bar that adjusts the distance from the bottom of the page to the margin would be wonderful! I mean, it would save us from having to do simple math.

My apologies if I've suggested features that are already implemented.

[vinesy]

re: superscript / subscript shortcut.

You can set one of your variations of character style to include superscript as property (e.g. base = normal, b = superscript, c = subscript...). These variations each have function key shortcuts. You can set these up by clicking styles > edit style sets...

Though, maybe you figured that out already.

[SDempsey]

Yeah, I've figured out how to manually set a keyboard shortcut for sub/superscripts.

Mellel developers, is there any reason why selection of text using the command key is not available? You can even do this in textedit, and it is a very useful feature.

[nicka]

Mellel uses its own text engine, not the one Apple provides in OS X. So non-contiguous selection would have to be coded; Mellel doesn't get it for free.

[SDempsey]

Well, that explains it.

Are there any alternatives methods to making my life easier for subscripting many things? I tried Find and Replace, but it doesn't seem possible to replace with text of more than one style. Setting Style Variations of 'Regular' seem to be a bit quicker, as they can be applied via a function key instead of a key combination (as required by making a whole new style).

[SDempsey]

I ALMOST have the Find and Replace w/ subscript figured out.
In the find field, do a (Word Boundary)[# OR ##](Word Boundary) search and replace the found entry with subscript-styled text. This finds most all numbers (single and double digit) in chemical formulae. The only thing that would make it perfect for chemical formulae would be to have it find numbers that come ONLY AFTER letters, but not have the find function actually select the letter. This would avoid finding superscripts (e.g., for charges, which almost always come after parenthesis or brackets).

[Bill]

The following quote regarding superscripts and subscripts is from an earlier discussion:

I use Text Expander for this, in combination with Charis SIL font, but it's a "mixed bag."

The beauty of the Charis SIL font is that it has a full set of numerical superscripts and subscripts, and numbers and letters are nicely aligned in their superscript or subscript positions. This is a great solution if you are writing things down only for yourself, or if you share documents in pdf format.

However, if you intend to share your words with other users in any format other than pdf, this solution does not work. Computers that don't have the Charis SIL font installed, substitute it for an already installed font. Abbreviations like 1ˢᵗ, 2ⁿᵈ, or ¹⁶O₂ can end up looking terrible on other computers, depending on the font substitution that takes place when Charis SIL is not installed. Most popular fonts lack consistent, good looking superscript and subscript characters.

[rpcameron]

I ALMOST have the Find and Replace w/ subscript figured out.
In the find field, do a (Word Boundary)[# OR ##](Word Boundary) search and replace the found entry with subscript-styled text. This finds most all numbers (single and double digit) in chemical formulae. The only thing that would make it perfect for chemical formulae would be to have it find numbers that come ONLY AFTER letters, but not have the find function actually select the letter. This would avoid finding superscripts (e.g., for charges, which almost always come after parenthesis or brackets).

The Find and Replace engine is basically a graphical frontend to a standard regex system. What that means is that in your find pattern, tell it to look for a letter followed by one or more numbers. However, create a group of just the numbers, leaving the letter outside of the group. That way, you can reference the group of numbers in the replace portion to only modify the style of them, and leaving the letters alone.

(I don't presently have Mellel installed on this computer, but I'll post later in some detail on this ...)

[rpcameron]

I created a quick Find and Replace that should work:

• Find:
  1. Insert element: “Letter”
  2. Group items: “Letter” (The group options are the buttons under the find text box.)
  3. Insert element: “Digit”
  4. Modify “Digit”: Repetition: “Once or more” (You get this by double-clicking on the “Digit” element.)
  5. Group items: “Digit”
  6. Optional: Apply formatting to the find expression (using the palettes) to restrict the search to particular styles or variations.
• Replace:
  1. Replace: “Backreference”
  2. Replace: “Backreference”
  3. Modify “Backreference”: Select the second backreference, and change its group index to 2 (This should match the number in the brackets surrounding the digits)
  4. Style “Backreference”: Choose your super-/subscript style variation from the palette, and apply it to the back reference.

Basically, you're looking for a letter, followed by one or more digits, and you want to change the character style variation of the digits only. By grouping the letter and the digit(s) separately, you're creating references that the replace expression can use. So, your replace box should look like:

Code: Select all

<1 <2

Now, don't do anything to the first back reference—that's the one that refers to the letter; you don't want to change that. But, you can modify the formatting of the second back reference, which are the digits. Also, if you only want to capture letters followed by one or two digits, but not more, a range can be set in the find options.

Hopefully this will give you some insight into what you can do with the find and replace options. Remember, that the dialog box is basically a pretty way to construct a regex, and anything you can do with a regex can probably be done in that dialog. Once you understand how to create a regex, it's usually fairly simple to translate into the tokens and elements that Mellel uses. Mellel's advantage in this is that you can further restrict your find criteria by styles or formatting, and you can similarly replace items and with themselves with only the formatting changed.

[SDempsey]

Thanks! With the addition of the Greedy option to the digit group, the find works; however, the replace doesn't work for a basic reason. As far as I can tell, you can't apply multiple (different) styles in Replace. What style is applied to one, is applied to all. For example, in the case you outlined, both the letter and the number are sub/superscripted, even though only the second back reference was chosen.

[rpcameron]

As far as I can tell, you can't apply multiple (different) styles in Replace. What style is applied to one, is applied to all.

That's truly a shame. I admit that I did not really test the F&R I gave you, so I apologize for that—I rarely use Mellel any more because it has too many idiosyncrasies and I have moved on to other workflows. Although Mellel has a good style system, it's still not perfect; obviously the same is true of its F&R.

[SDempsey]

Yeah, there are great ideas in Mellel. Most implemented pretty well, but with just a few things missing to make it just right. Being able to replace with what's in the clipboard would be a good alternative as well. You can do this in M$ Word.

I think Mellel can keep its generality of design, and implement standard features that typical users expect to see in a Word Processor.

For the most part, the UI design is really clean, though too many drop-down menus are present. Some menus with few items should be replaced with buttons (e.g., Bold, Italics). Title-flow elements should be in a "well" like the tabs are, so the user can just drag and drop them where they desire. Drop-down menus just add another click to everything. Of course, there must be a balance struck to keep the UI clean.

One thing that I've noticed, and I've actually seen mention of on other forms, is that the developers don't seem to be very active here or in response to requests sent directly to them. For such a small company, this seems troubling. Jon from SonnnySoftware (Bookends) does an amazing job at answering questions on his forum. Something like that would be great here.

Have the developers' activity on the forum always been so low, or is this recent?

[macsailor]

One thing that I've noticed, and I've actually seen mention of on other forms, is that the developers don't seem to be very active here or in response to requests sent directly to them. For such a small company, this seems troubling. Jon from SonnnySoftware (Bookends) does an amazing job at answering questions on his forum. Something like that would be great here.

Have the developers' activity on the forum always been so low, or is this recent?

Jon at Sonny Software is one of a kind. I would say he's the fastest question answerer I have seen so far. He alone is worth paying for upgrades on Bookend.

I really wish the Redlers could be as active as Jon. They are quite fast answering questions over e-mail, but it would be good to know that they are aware of questions on the forum as well. Mellel is worth a little bit more attention from the creators of the software.

Some years ago the Redlers were much more active on the forum, but for the last, two, three years they have not disappeared, but have unfortunately been more or less absent from the forum.

[nicka]

Title-flow elements should be in a "well" like the tabs are, so the user can just drag and drop them where they desire.

Yes this would be great. Long ago one of the Redlers said that they would look into implementing this, I think...

[SDempsey]

Title-flow elements should be in a "well" like the tabs are, so the user can just drag and drop them where they desire.

Yes this would be great. Long ago one of the Redlers said that they would look into implementing this, I think...

I just found a tutorial document (from 2004), and they have screenshots and descriptions of title-flow elements working roughly the way we want. What happened?

http://www.redlers.com/download/tips/de ... gflows.zip