Exports of Mellel 4.0 to Word. Solutions, Expensive and Not?

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laup
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 311
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2006 4:13 am
Location: Topanga, California

Exports of Mellel 4.0 to Word. Solutions, Expensive and Not?

Post by laup »

Mellel 4's indexing will add to the many nice features Mellel brings to the party. However, some of us have to export to Word. Thus, it's essential that that work well. Otherwise, indexing will be useful, as well as cross referencing, etc. There continue to be some pretty significant shortcomings in the Mellel-to-Word export. These include pagination (front matter numbered i, ii,.. maps into 1, 2, ..., messing up all pagination in the document), imperfect mapping of page margin and header information, which again messes up pagination. Other problems relate to cell borders and the colored fills of cells. I verified today that some of those problems still exist. Unfortunately, it's not trivial to make corrections in the Word document. It would be good if the export to rtf could be perfected. I would think that would do more for the market value of Mellel than a lot of things slated for 4.0.

It MAY be that a solution now exists at a cost that may be tolerable to some. I tested two manuscripts this morning, exporting from Mellel to pdf, and then using Adobe Acrobat to open the pdf and export to Word. Although I did not check each and every page for glitches, the pagination throughout is correct, the cell filling of a table was correct, and everything looks correct, including some equations.

I wonder what others' experience is, or whether there is some guarantee based on knowledge of how export to pdf and Adobe's subsequent export to Work work that tells that we can now count on accurate exports to Word if we go via pdf and Adobe Acrobat. If so, that would a big deal. Adobe Acrobat DC costs $15/month ($180/year), so it is expensive (except for a short free trial), but there are other reasons for having Adobe Acrobat DC. Also, there exist less expensive pdf-to-Word programs, although they may or may not be as reliable and may or may not be acceptable for other reasons. They may also not always be free. I don't have time to check them all out, but others may have done some checking.

Experience in perfect or near-perfect conversions to Word that would preserve pagination, etc.?
Paul
ymeroz
Got the auto-title mojo working
Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Oct 09, 2008 12:49 am

Re: Exports of Mellel 4.0 to Word. Solutions, Expensive and

Post by ymeroz »

Does 4.0 export styles to Word files?
jas
Got the styles thing figured out
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2010 10:30 am

Re: Exports of Mellel 4.0 to Word. Solutions, Expensive and

Post by jas »

.docx export very important! Here's hoping it will be in 4.0.
laup
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 311
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2006 4:13 am
Location: Topanga, California

Re: Exports of Mellel 4.0 to Word. Solutions, Expensive and

Post by laup »

Even with Mellel 3, after exporting to rtf or .doc, one can open in Word and save-as to .docx. Also, if one exports to pdf and converts to Word with Acrobat, the result is a .docx.
Paul
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