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Value of Index Depends on Preserving Pagination

Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 3:04 pm
by laup
The planned Mellel 4.0 sound very good and I look forward to seeing the result. It's great to see these things happening.
The Index will be especially nice. However, for those of us who must ultimately send the results to an editor, journal, or collaborator in pdf or Word, the index might or might not still be valid.

Pagination in Export to pdf
If the export to pdf guaranteed to preserve pagination and validity of the index? In my very limited experiments, all is well, but it would be nice to know whether this is a non-problem.

Pagination in Export to Word
Based on past experience and rechecked today, there are a LOT of problems when exporting to rtf or Word, pagination changes included.
a. The number of pages changes
b. The page numbering changes because front matter numbered as i, ii, ... comes across as 1, 2, ....
c. Some other strange things sometimes happen in front matter

If such things happen, the beautiful, rigorous index is now useless in its Word version. I don't believe that it can be easily fixed with a bit of manual editing.

I hope that Ori and Eyal will tell us otherwise, but I fear that the Index feature will be of no value if the final manuscript must be exported to Word--unless the quality of export to .rtf and Word is improved. As discussed in an earlier post (November 10, 2015 "Toward a Sneaky Way..."), there continue to be quite a number of export problems with Mellel that appear to avoidable because other programs do conversions correctly. This includes pagination problems.

How Does Mellel Measure Up?
Looking at the How Does Mellel Measure Up? table on the Mellel website (http://www.mellel.com/mellel/), it seems to me to be a pretty good summary (including recognition of a few warts) except for the discussion of export/import stuff. I found that discussion hard to understand. It says:
Mellel offers export to RTF, Doc, PDF, Plain text and OPML; It supports import from RTF (fully), doc and docx (more rudimentary), OPML and plain text. RTF export and import is good — but Mellel is weak on most of the other fronts.
Hmm. I think that the export to pdf is very good, although perhaps I have missed imperfections. However, I think that its export to RTF is subpar [see my earlier post, mentioned above] and quite troublesome except for simple stuff. Perhaps this is limited by whatever Apple provides

Another issue under how Mellel "measures up" is collaborating with Word users. This can be done, but it's painful.

Re: Value of Index Depends on Preserving Pagination

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:48 am
by vinesy
Simple solution: get your editor to switch to Mellel 8)