What's next for Mellel 3.4?

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SDempsey
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What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by SDempsey »

So with 3.3 we have comments, improved find/find sets, improved Auto-titles and ToC, and some bug fixes.

What features are on the top of the list for implementation in Mellel 3.4?

Anchoring captions to figures and tables seems be the most useful feature for the broadest user base. Adding a caption to a figure or table should be as simple as right-clicking on the figure, and choosing to add a caption. Once this is added, it should be attached to the figure and move with figure. Of course, some options of where to place the caption are needed.

Indexing. I have zero use for this, but it seems like a must have for long documents, in general.

These two features seem to be the biggest "missing" features in Mellel.

Ultimately, I think some page layout features would be really nice. The ability do draw a box on the page, place it in a desired location, and tell it to STAY would be wonderful. And in this box, you could place an image or whatever else you wanted. Also, the ability to move (drag and drop) entire pages to anywhere in the document would also be useful in certain cases (like how you can move around slides in PowerPoint).

So, what are your most-wanted features for Mellel 3.4?
jannuss
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by jannuss »

In order of priority for my use:

1. What I most need is improved handling of sections in a manner that would facilitate both side-by-side translations and/or commentary
-- non-symmetric sections [manual control over where the section divider falls]
-- independent column flows [right-hand column on page n flows down to the right-hand column on page n+1]
-- ability to set an anchor or link in text in one column to a position in the opposite column.

2. Similarly, it would be very, very nice [for translations] to have separate text flows for all the odd pages and all the even pages.

3. Ability to place a landscape page in a portrait document

4. Last on my list, since I don't need it: many people have asked for more than two languages in the character style definition

Janet
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by nicka »

Export to pdf creating a table of contents (of the kind that shows up in the sidebar in Preview, Adobe Reader etc.).
ahankinson
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by ahankinson »

The ability to anchor captions and figures is a big one in my books.
rwg
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by rwg »

It would be nice to finally get support for Devanagari and other Indic scripts after having had it promised many, many years ago.
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by macsailor »

jannuss wrote:In order of priority for my use:

3. Ability to place a landscape page in a portrait document

Janet
AFAIK this is already possible with the use of Section brakes.
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jannuss
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by jannuss »

macsailor wrote:
jannuss wrote:In order of priority for my use:

3. Ability to place a landscape page in a portrait document

Janet
AFAIK this is already possible with the use of Section brakes.
My bad: it does indeed work using Page Style Breaks and redefining the page orientation

Janet
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by Enkidu Jones »

I'd (still) like to see the "Secondary font" function expanded so that a different font could be assigned to each keyboard configuration (then I could easily use more than two languages in a document with ease)!
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by laup »

Lots of things are worthwhile and many authors have special needs. My vote, however, would be:

1. Perfect the export to rtf/Word (in all cases in which Word has the necessary features) and, in other cases, do a more perfect job on default guesses. My biggest problems have been losing the color of table cells when exporting to Word. Other problems have included disruptions of the front matter/main text page numbering.

2. Index. This would be a powerfully and attractive feature. On the negative side, if the manuscript still has to be exported to Word, the beautiful index would probably be wrong. I have not experimented enough to know how hard it is to iterate between Mellel and Word so as to get the pagination identical. It's probably not too hard (tens minutes rather than hours). Assuming consistent fonts, I think that it would be just a matter of demanding some line breaks.

***Much lower***
3. Cross referencing. I love the cross-referencing in Mellel and use it regularly while drafting. However, I have to delete all that good stuff when exporting to Word because page numbers will be wrong or will become wrong after editing in Word. If it just so happened that the Redlers folks understand Word's cross-referencing mechanism well enough, and that the mechanism is powerful and stable enough, it is perhaps possible that the export could include the proper codes in Word. My guess is that that is beyond the pale.

4. I agree with the other suggestions that have been made but they'd be lower on my personal list.
Paul
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by shades »

ahankinson wrote:The ability to anchor captions and figures is a big one in my books.
This would be my primary need in the next version.

Word exchange would be a distant second.
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redlers
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4? (on behalf of Benjamin Moon)

Post by redlers »

Benjamin mood would like to comment:
>I'd like to second the call for an indexing service and anchoring captions
>in Mellel. Also, can you add support for changing the kerning of
>characters, particularly useful when using e.g. small caps.
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by redlers »

I must say, reading the comments here, that it feels like some of you are sitting in our plan-meetings :shock:

Many points here are hitting the nail right on the head, regarding our own plan for the next versions of Mellel (especially anchored captions and indexing, but not just).
redlers
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by redlers »

laup wrote:Lots of things are worthwhile and many authors have special needs. My vote, however, would be:

1. Perfect the export to rtf/Word (in all cases in which Word has the necessary features) and, in other cases, do a more perfect job on default guesses. My biggest problems have been losing the color of table cells when exporting to Word. Other problems have included disruptions of the front matter/main text page numbering.

2. Index. This would be a powerfully and attractive feature. On the negative side, if the manuscript still has to be exported to Word, the beautiful index would probably be wrong. I have not experimented enough to know how hard it is to iterate between Mellel and Word so as to get the pagination identical. It's probably not too hard (tens minutes rather than hours). Assuming consistent fonts, I think that it would be just a matter of demanding some line breaks.

***Much lower***
3. Cross referencing. I love the cross-referencing in Mellel and use it regularly while drafting. However, I have to delete all that good stuff when exporting to Word because page numbers will be wrong or will become wrong after editing in Word. If it just so happened that the Redlers folks understand Word's cross-referencing mechanism well enough, and that the mechanism is powerful and stable enough, it is perhaps possible that the export could include the proper codes in Word. My guess is that that is beyond the pale.

4. I agree with the other suggestions that have been made but they'd be lower on my personal list.
Regarding point 2 and 3 - there are limits to what can be done when the export forces degradation. When exporting to RTF Mellel will be limited to what RTF can do, so I'm not sure how, for example, it would be possible to keep cross referencing options that Word does not offer. It'll probably be the same with indexing, albeit less severe.
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by rpcameron »

redlers wrote:
laup wrote:2. Index. This would be a powerfully and attractive feature. On the negative side, if the manuscript still has to be exported to Word, the beautiful index would probably be wrong. I have not experimented enough to know how hard it is to iterate between Mellel and Word so as to get the pagination identical. It's probably not too hard (tens minutes rather than hours). Assuming consistent fonts, I think that it would be just a matter of demanding some line breaks.

***Much lower***
3. Cross referencing. I love the cross-referencing in Mellel and use it regularly while drafting. However, I have to delete all that good stuff when exporting to Word because page numbers will be wrong or will become wrong after editing in Word. If it just so happened that the Redlers folks understand Word's cross-referencing mechanism well enough, and that the mechanism is powerful and stable enough, it is perhaps possible that the export could include the proper codes in Word. My guess is that that is beyond the pale.
Regarding point 2 and 3 - there are limits to what can be done when the export forces degradation. When exporting to RTF Mellel will be limited to what RTF can do, so I'm not sure how, for example, it would be possible to keep cross referencing options that Word does not offer. It'll probably be the same with indexing, albeit less severe.
I'm not sure why 2 and 3 are not possible. Every feature that Word supports is available in RTF. While pagination may not work as planned (as parts of the style system are different, too), why wouldn't indices and cross-references? Couldn't the RTF version include the index/references as fields to be updated by Word rather than exporting with the page number from Mellel as static text?
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Re: What's next for Mellel 3.4?

Post by harryhoffner »

For the next version of Mellel.

Please see my earlier feature request in the forum entry "Making the bibliography window in the palette useful". The bibliography pane needs to be much more specific as to the works in the list, especially when there are more than one entry by the same author and year.
Also see the long list of good points in "PDF TOC links", all having to do with preserving links of various types in export to PDF.
Under the entry "3.0 Wish List" I would still urge implementation of discontiguous selection, and a split screen feature for simultaneous viewing and editing of more than one location in a long document.
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