Patrick wrote: ↑Mon Mar 19, 2018 8:32 amNo space choice between characters, so useful for example for subtitles styles
Are you referring to kerning here? Kerning has been announced for all fonts in the upcoming v4.1.
Is the main quality of Mellel just for structuring a book and be confident with voluminous documents? I am not sure I am willing to spend so much time on learning the way this app works.
The strength of Mellel lies indeed in the Outline which allows the user to view (colored) bookmarks and AutoTitles simultaneously (Nisus can't do that). The user can also enter comments into bookmarks, so called "Remarks" in Mellel's parlance, which can be made visible in the Outline, but are not printed. This is very useful. One can also focus on certain parts of the outline and hide others that are momentarily not needed.
Mellel has a few extra typographical frills when it comes to creating character styles. It's nice to have them, but for scholarly papers and books in the humanities such embellishments are not needed.
This is about everything I can think of in favor of Mellel, apart from the overall appealing interface, that is. For me, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Just three, random examples: [1] no multipart selection, also called “noncontiguous selection”. This, for example, makes it difficult to edit documents that you have not created yourself or you have downloaded from the Internet. If such a document has all headings written in UPPERCASE (or in blue, or in italics… or whatever), there is no way to select all parts in one go and then turn them into AutoTitles. You must do it manually … one by one, one after the other. Nisus, on the contrary, can turn such text instantly into headings with appropriate levels and thus make them visible in the Navigator (= Outline in Mellel.) [2] No macros. [3] Not scriptable.
The arguments brought forward in favor of Mellel (see for example the testimonials on YouTube) do not bear close scrutiny: (1) it's certainly not easier to combine many different languages in one document with Mellel than in Nisus. Fact is, it's much easier and more straightforward to do this in Nisus. Mellel has issues with cocoAspelt, in Nisus it works perfectly. It's possible though that Hebrew and some extinct ancient Near East languages are better supported by Mellel, I don't have the qualification to make a judgement on that because I don't write in those languages.
(2) As far as stability is concerned, I have already given examples here in the forum of operations that will make Mellel crash. The examples I mentioned were all related to the find and replace box. (3) A recurrent theme in the testimonials is the apparent ease of use. Nothing could be more far from the truth. Idiosyncratic implementation of many core features require an in-debt study of the manual, without which you will feel lost in Mellel. I'm not saying that this is bad per se. I'm just saying that the learning curve is steep and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who has just started with his or her PhD and has a limited and rigid time schedule.
Patrick, could you give examples of when Nisus is unstable? I have not noticed that.
I begin to feel frustrated with all those Word processor. I guess I should stop buying them and go to Pages
I understand your frustration, but bear in mind that it all depends on WHAT you intend to do. Mellel is good for structuring *primary* documents, and by that I mean documents that you yourself create from scratch. Thus you can create AutoTitles as you go along. Nisus Writer Pro
excels when it comes to *editing* primary AND secondary documents. Download, for example, Anna Karenina from Project Gutenberg and measure the time how long it takes to transform the chapters into AutoTitles. In Nisus it takes 1 second!
Apple Pages is not for academics. If you are not an academic, not a professional writer and if you like the additional DTP and layout abilities of Pages, then there is nothing wrong with using Pages. Different tools for different jobs.
Which word processor you choose also depends on what kind of person you are, I believe. Are you a computer nerd? Do you find it interesting to write scripts and macros, discover new word processors and solve computer related problems? I'm like that, but my wife (who's an academic) hates it. She still writes all her papers without styles. Something I would never do.