Mellel and Dragon

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jzents
Read the guide, knows everything
Posts: 52
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2005 8:16 pm
Location: Edinburg, TX

Mellel and Dragon

Post by jzents »

I love your word processor for my academic writing chores. The integration of Bookends is extremely helpful. As are many of the other features like auto titles etc. This is more of a request. I like to do my writing in your program, particularly after I have sketched out the basics in Scrivener. The slight catch is that I like to do most of my writing using Dragon for Mac from Nuance. Up until recently, I never had any issues interfacing Dragon and Mellel. But with the arrival of Dragon for Mac version 6 and Sierra it is now a somewhat bumpy connection. Evidently there are certain things the programmers can do to make it easier for Dragon for Mac to interact with the program. It has something to do with the Accessibility API. I do not know how problematic that is for Mellel. However, if it is something that you can do, I would really appreciate it. Obviously, if there are more downsides and upsides then obviously you would not want to do it. But I'm putting it on the table, because it is one of the very few features/behaviors of the program that is less than absolutely optimal. I just wanted to make you aware that this issue exists and perhaps it is one that can be addressed easily without messing up everything else. Whatever the answer thank you very much for a wonderful program!
rebbi@texas.net
New to all this
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Nov 01, 2010 7:01 pm

Re: Mellel and Dragon

Post by rebbi@texas.net »

Okay, I may be the only other person in Mellel-land who also uses Dragon Dictate for Mac, but I, too, would love to see Mellel better behaved with this software. The original poster is correct – I believe it does have something to do with the Accessibility API being enabled. What this does is to allow mixed typing by hand and dictation in the same document window. Microsoft Word does this. Microsoft outlook for Mac also does this, albeit with a few glitches here and there. So, too, does TextEdit. Apple's Mail.app, for some brain-dead reason, does not. What this means is that Dragon Dictate cannot "know" where the cursor is in the document window of the application into which you are dictating. In such a case, when you instruct Dragon Dictate to "insert before" a given word in the document, you have to watch the cursor scroll through all the text between where you are currently and where you want to be. On the other hand, in applications that have this particular API implemented (and I'm not a programmer so I don't really understand how this works) the cursor will simply jump to the position without having to scroll through all the intermediate text. It's lovely, and it's pretty close to the way that Dragon NaturallySpeaking works under Windows OS.
I'm not holding my breath for this feature in Mellel but want to agree with the original poster that this functionality would be a dream come true for me because I would much rather work with Mellel than Microsoft Word for Mac!
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