Why does Mellel have no highlighters?

[Bill]

Style variations are subsets of character styles.

A method to change the color of text while preserving all style variations is to set up consistent style variations among different character styles.

For example, Variation 1 = Bold, Variation 2 = Italics, etc. across all character styles. (I have taken this a step further by renaming the style variations from numbers to decriptive names.)

Then, character style Regular could be black, while a new character style, perhaps called Red Regular or Highlight Regular, could be red. The default style variations for the new character style will take on the same color as the base variation (unless it was originally different from the base.)

Now, it is easy to highlight text by seletcting the desired character style, and all style variations are preserved.

[ozean]

Now that's a clever workaround!
The only backdraw is that it would cause clutter by doubling the number of character styles… But until the Redlers have implemented this as a distinct feature I will rely on your suggestion, I guess.
Thanks for the tip!

[Timotheus]

In my opinion we should not focus upon what is possible, but upon what is practical, upon what is usual, upon what will presumably be welcomed by present and future users of Mellel. It is not always wrong to be mainstream!

Moreover, in my opinion text highlighting / text marking should remain separated form text printing. Higlighting and provisional annotations should not be visible on paper. And following the solution proposed by Bill they would.

But, Maria, what exactly are hereditary styles?

[stoic]

Since there's been no comment on this topic since mid-Sept., 2006, just let me put my two-bits worth in here. Mellel needs a highlighter, and also a split screen function. These are basic writers tools, for the early work on a manuscript, as well as sharing drafts with others. I'm a bit surprised everyone has been so quiet about this for so long. I shouldn't think that it would be a huge problem to add.

[frvs]

It seems to me that some of the complaints have been from people so used to using Word that they have forgotten how idiosyncratic Word is. Mellel uses a very different basic premise than does Word: it is based on styles. I have not found Mellel's style in any way difficult. They seem so simple and obvious. And the fact that the program offers a variety of metods for setting and selecting styles is a plus, in my view.
Don Broadribb

I heartily agree. And the fact Mellel does NOT havle inheriting/cascading styles is one strong reason I love it. Mellel allows for clean, consistent documents and well-defined structural features. In my experience, to import a Word document into it is always a cleanup job for that document. Mellel is both idiosynchratic and best-of-breed, and I'd like it to keep that way. Insofar as it does things differently, it also tends to do them with a sense of excellence That is invaluable, imho. If autotitles were to ceace being well-defined objects or cascading styles were introduced, for instance, I might as well shift back to Word—it offers more features, after all…

Mellel is radically different, and that, in itself, is precious and ecologically sound. Despite the fact that Mellel still lacks some obvious features, such as end-of-section endnotes, I value it more and more as go on working with it. PLEASE don't turn it into another half-baked half-clone of Ms Word.