breaking hyperlinks

[Bulow]

This may seem an odd question, but the problem is serious enough for me:
Inserting hyperlinks and exporting them to pdf &c works fine. Now I am editing for web-publication in pdf a 600 pages MS where the author has picked Greek texts from a website and put the text into his Word MS. So, open docx in Nisus (why can Mellel still not do that?) save as rtf, open in Mellel. It was at this point that I discovered that some of the texts were blue and underlined and that this could not be taken away with a change of style or similar. Typographically it looks ugly and the hyperlinks are at best unnecessary in the context. I can treat the words one by one so that they at least become black and not underlined, although they are still 'hot', but that would be a lot of work in order to solve half the problem. Is there a button somewhere that says 'break hyperlinks'?
Bülow

[Bulow]

Well, apparently nobody else has the solution either. I solved the problem by re-exporting to Nisus, chosing 'all hyperlinks' and then deleting them which is possible in Nisus.

[jannuss]

Bulow, I don't have a solution to the hyperlinks problem -- I usually get them in ones and twos, so no big deal to erase them by hand -- but, I'm curious why you have to move the docx file via Nisus.

I open docx files directly into Mellel all the time without difficulty.
[If you don't count the fact that Hebrew WORD files come across as Left-to-Right and have to be switched back Right-to-Left]

Janet

[rpcameron]

… I'm curious why you have to move the docx file via Nisus.

Mellel's Word import abilities are inherited from OS X. If the version of OS X he is using does not support Office Open XML (aka, Microsoft's XML format, docx being the word processing component), then Mellel will not. Whatever features of Word format documents that TextEdit supports are the only features that Mellel will support with Word import.

Nisus (and most other word processors) provide their own Word importers, so they support features that differ from TextEdit and/or Mellel. (Because Mellel relies on the OS for Word import, that probably also explains why Mellel does not really support Word format documents. Exporting to Word from within Mellel is really an RTF file with a .DOC extension. Mellel's Word support is minimal at best, only incorporating the features offered by the OS to every application: RedleX hasn't done any work to support Word documents beyond RTF.)

[Bulow]

Well rpcameron has already answered for me: if I import doc or docx directly into Mellel, I loose footnotes and much else. But would this be better if I changed from OSX 10.7.5 to 10.8.x ? So far I have seen no reason to upgrade, but is there a good reason here?
Bulow

[rpcameron]

But would this be better if I changed from OSX 10.7.5 to 10.8.x ? So far I have seen no reason to upgrade, but is there a good reason here?

To be honest, I'm not sure. I would say probably not. I'm running 10.9 here, and TextEdit does not support tracking, comments or notes. Links, lists and tables are supported, along with minimal style support; I imagine this is the same level of support for Word import that Mellel offers.

However, if you are going to upgrade to 10.8, you might as well upgrade to 10.9: every system that can run 10.8 is also supported by 10.9, and it's a free upgrade. The only caveat would be to ensure that your applications will all run under 10.8/9, or that you will not have to repurchase any applications because of an associated upgrade.

Yet, if you are working with Mellel, and working with .DOC(X) files, why aren't you requesting those files be sent as RTF instead? RTF supports every feature that .DOC(X) supports, and is openly published; the only features you should be losing would be those that Mellel does not offer. (Of course, that is dependent upon Mellel's RTF support being updated to support the latest version of Office—2013 for Windows and 2011 for Mac.)

[nicka]

I also don't have a solution for the OP, but wanted to comment on Mellel's (lack of) support for doc and docx files. It's only sometimes possible to request an rtf file instead of doc or docx. Sometimes it's socially impossible; sometimes the file is downloaded from the internet, not sent; and sometimes the application that produced the file does not export to adequate rtf (e.g. Pages).

I think that this is gradually becoming a bigger problem, as docx becomes more popular, and rtf less popular.

Scrivener had the same problem, but the developers have licensed good third-party doc and docx importers/exporters. Possibly worth looking at, Redlers?

[macsailor]

Nisus (and most other word processors) provide their own Word importers, so they support features that differ from TextEdit and/or Mellel.

AFAIK Nisus has two options while importing to and exporting from the .docx format. In Preferences - Advanced you can chose between import/export the files based on MacOSX (faster) or LibreOffice (more complete). I hope Mellel will implement this feature as well. Hopefully, but I doubt it, they will be able to implement it to Mellel 3.4 or at least 3.5.

[rpcameron]

Nisus (and most other word processors) provide their own Word importers, so they support features that differ from TextEdit and/or Mellel.

AFAIK Nisus has two options while importing to and exporting from the .docx format. In Preferences - Advanced you can chose between import/export the files based on MacOSX (faster) or LibreOffice (more complete). I hope Mellel will implement this feature as well. Hopefully, but I doubt it, they will be able to implement it to Mellel 3.4 or at least 3.5.

Personally, I'd rather Mellel implement features that users have been demanding (and in some cases been promised) for quite some time, such as parallel columns (for translation), linked/anchored Auto-Titles to images, &c., more than one Auto-Title on a level, indexing, cascading styles, better support for multiple scripts in a single style, better support for TOC in export, &c.

What disappoints me most with the situation with Word support is that it is disingenuous: Word support is minimal at best, and Word export is non-existent. I'd prefer the option for Word export be eliminated (because it's not a Word format export, it's RTF with a Word file extension), and a prompt shown to the user upon Word import for what features are going to be lost and/or not supported when it comes to Mellel.

[Bulow]

However, if you are going to upgrade to 10.8, you might as well upgrade to 10.9: every system that can run 10.8 is also supported by 10.9, and it's a free upgrade. The only caveat would be to ensure that your applications will all run under 10.8/9, or that you will not have to repurchase any applications because of an associated upgrade.

Well, having read the reviews on Appstore starting with 'most helpful' I don't exactly feel tempted to upgrade to 10.9. I think I'll stay with 10.7.5 for a while yet - it works.

Yet, if you are working with Mellel, and working with .DOC(X) files, why aren't you requesting those files be sent as RTF instead?

Oh I do, I do, but it rarely happens. Anyway, the detour via Nisus is not difficult.
Bulow