Update on Export to Word

For all things Mellel

Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler

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

Update on Export to Word

Post by laup »

A chronic problem for Mellel users is exporting to Microsoft Word. Various earlier posts have addressed the issue over the years. The export from Mellel to rtf still has a number of problems, which carry through to a Word document.

Currently, I find that my best option is to export from Mellel to pdf, and to then use the Adobe Reader option for exporting from pdf to Word (.docx). I recently paid $23.88 for a year's subscription to "Adobe Export PDF." Since Adobe has expertise and incentives for doing this well, it seems to me a good bet relative to one of the many competitors.

So far, I have used it with two articles intended for journal publication. The first export was perfect. The second, today, seems to be perfect except that in one graphic some lines with arrowheads appear in the Word document as arrowheads. In Mellel, and also in the pdf exported from Mellel, the graphics looked fine. I believe that they were .pngs pasted in from making a screenshot of an earlier publication's figure.

I was able to fix the problem by copying the figure from Mellel and pasting-special as pdf to Word. However, doing that successfully required experimenting in Word until it worked. Only the bottom of the pasted figure was visible; the rest was beneath the previous paragraph. I succeeded in properly positioning the figure, in two or three different ways, but what I did was ad hoc. Redlers or another forum reader may be able to specify a foolproof way to do so.

The good news is that pagination, formatting, footnoting, tables, and all but the one figure came across perfectly. That's a great improvement over a few years ago.
Paul
ealvarez
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 130
Joined: Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:44 pm

Re: Update on Export to Word

Post by ealvarez »

Thanks for the update! 👍
Post Reply