Tutorial Notes

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donb
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Tutorial Notes

Post by donb »

The Beginners Tutorial 2.1
I have worked through the corrections and suggestions proposed so far, corrected the lack of page numbers in some parts of the Tutorial, reworded and expanded some not so clear items. Eventually a revised text of the Tutorial will be issued. Meanwhile, some of the questions asked so far are of general interest and I’ll try to answer them here:

(1) Sometimes, usually after paragraph styles have been changed for some reason, perhaps when converting text from a Microsoft Word file to Mellel, some or all of your bold face and italic face text reverts to regular face.

The reason for this is that most (all?) users are somewhat inconsistent in the way they make their bold face and italic face text.

Mellel allows you to use the system wide ordinary OS X method: command-b changes a highlighted word to bold face, command-i changes it to italics, command-b and command-i applied to the same word make italic bold, etc. In most OS X programs this is the usual method, either that or choosing “bold” or “italic”, etc., from a menu.
Mellel’s also allows you to use its own special F-key method. Unless you intentionally change it, Mellel is preset to use the F2 key for bold face, F3 for italics, etc. This is a specialty of Mellel, and makes it possible to integrate paragraph and character styles, one of Mellel’s most valuable features.

If you are inconsistent, and sometimes you use the command-b or command-i method and other times Mellel’s special F-key method, occasionally the two methods do conflict.

For example: suppose you have the Times font associated with paragraph style “Regular”, and Minion Pro with paragraph style “Quotation”. Both fonts have bold and italic faces available for use.

When you have made your bold and italic faces with Mellel’s F2 and F3 method, these faces will carry over from one paragraph style to another.

If you are inconsistent and sometimes use the command-b method for bold face and other times use the F2 method, you may find that when you change the paragraph style of the text concerned, the bold face made with F2 is preserved as bold, but the words you made bold by using command-b revert to regular face.

This is not a bug in Mellel. It is a result of Mellel’s having added the special paragraph style feature and the F-key method.

Most people used to OS X find it hard to consistently use only F2 and never command-b.

There are two simple solutions.

One is to train yourself so as never to be inconsistent. However, many people find that very hard to do...

The other is to use a macro program such as the shareware iKey so that whenever you press command-b in Mellel, Mellel interprets this as meaning that you have pressed the F2 key. That way you can be inconsistent and nevertheless Mellel will know to keep the bold face no matter which method you used (unless, of course, you switch to a font that has no bold face).

(2) In the Margins and Tabs palette, some users are confused as to what the difference is between “Start” and “Indent”, and just what “Dec. align on” mean.
In this palette, “Indent” refers to how far over from the margin (in English this refers to the left margin) you want the first line to begin. Many writers like to have the first line of their paragraphs to be indented say 20 points (or some other figure).

“Start” refers to whether you want the other lines of your paragraph also to be indented. If you were to type “20 pt” for the “Start” setting, as well as for the “Indent” setting, then all your lines in the paragraph would begin at 20 points in from the document’s margin. This is unusual in ordinary document writing, but may be needed in typesetting documents.

“Dec. align on” allows you to align decimals so that the decimal points are underneath each other at the position you have set a tab. In English, the decimal point is usually a dot, for instance “12.3”. Having set a tab where you want your decimals to line up, type a dot in the “Dec. align on” box, and this tells Mellel to look for a dot when you press the tab key, in order to align the decimals neatly under each other.

Other languages may use other decimal symbols. Many European languages use a comma rather than a dot to indicate a decimal: 12,3 instead of the English style of writing 12.3. If you want to use this European style, type a comma in the “Dec. align” box. If you are used to using yet a different symbol to indicate a decimal, type that in the box.

“End” refers to how far from the other margin (in English, this would be the right margin) you want your paragraph to end. You might want the right margin to be indented as well as the left margin. In that case, type in the “End” box the distance from the right margin you want the paragraph to end. If you had set the “Start” position of your paragraph at 20pt, and the “End position” at 20pt, your paragragh would have its left and right ends neatly aligned 20pt from each margin. (And the first line of your paragraph would be indented 25pt, if you set the “Indent” at 25.)

(3) Some users new to Mellel are unaware that they can have special symbols appear on screen to indicate things like paragraph ends, line ends, tab marks, etc. You can choose to have these or other usually “invisible” marks show on screen for your document by clicking on the “Show” button at the bottom left of your Mellel screen, and choosing which you want. If you want them to appear on screen in all Mellel documents, this can be done by using the “Appearance” section of Mellel’s Preferences (accessible from the Mellel Menu).

(4) In editing Style Sets, what is the purpose of the icon that means “Global?”

Normally, when you make a new Style Set, this is for your specific document, and that Style Set will not be available when you make new documents. If you want the new Style Set to be a permanent part of Mellel’s repertoire, clicking the “Global” icon will make it so.

(5) Why are the Page Setup details not included as a part of the Page Style details?

Page Setup details (accessed from the File Menu) are a part of the OS X system, and not specific to Mellel. If you want a specific page style to always use specific Page Setup details, set up a blank document with the Page Style and Page Setup details you want, and save it as a template. Use that template to have both page style and page setup details pre-defined.

(6) Is it possible to make special notes for yourself, in a document, to remind you of things that still need to be verified, or enlarged upon, or whatever? And be able to delete these special notes all in one fell swoop when you are satisfied that the document is now in final shape?
Yes. Define a note style, which you might call “Author’s notes”, with both the Character and Paragraph Menus, making sure to link the Character style to the Paragraph style. In the Character style choose an obvious color for the text, say red or purple or dark blue.

Then open the “Edit note attributes” sub-menu from the “Note” choices in the Insert Menu, and click on the + icon to make a new note stream. Then click on the New Style button, and give the new note stream its name, “Author’s notes”. For paragraph style choose the “Author’s notes” paragraph style. Make sure you have “bottom of page” for position. Choose Reference Symbols different from the ones used for ordinary footnotes. Assign the style a keyboard shortcut, if you wish.

Now whenever you want to put in a special note to yourself, use this note stream. Your notes will stand out through their color and reference symbols.

The entire set of Author’s Notes can eventually be deleted in one go from the document. Simply open again the “Edit note attributes” window, click on the “Author’s Notes” stream in the list, and click on the delete icon (which looks like a minus sign). Mellel will ask you to confirm that you want to annihilate that stream. Once you have confirmed it and close the window, Mellel will magically delete all the “Author’s Notes” from the document.

(7) Why do the edit windows for Notes in the Edit Style Sets windows and in the Insert > Notes > Edit note attributes cover mostly but not entirely the same items?
This is a slight oversight on the part of the programmers. The Edit Style Sets feature is a relatively new addition to Mellel, and has not been fully integrated with the Edit notes attributes feature from the Insert Menu, unlike what we would expect. That is why it is important to check the settings in both menus.
FA1
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Post by FA1 »

I still don't understand the advantage of having the F-keys for bold and italics that remain with style changes, instead of having the command keys do so.
verma
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Post by verma »

FA1 wrote:I still don't understand the advantage of having the F-keys for bold and italics that remain with style changes, instead of having the command keys do so.
The command-b or command-i are typically superficial or temporal commands: they remain untill you change the paragraph syle, for example. Changing a paragraph style, unfortunately, does occur - in those cases you lose the "face"-setting of the character. That can be quite annoying...

With the F-keys ("variation"), you give a permanent character style to those words/letters: even if the paragraph style later one changes, you can be sure that those elements you F-marked as bold or italic, stay the way you wanted them to be.

All in all, the F-key mapping is a very, very lovely feature, imho.
macsailor
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Post by macsailor »

verma wrote:All in all, the F-key mapping is a very, very lovely feature, imho.
Have to agree on this one.
Peter Edwardsson
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zoul
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Post by zoul »

I think the “ad-hoc formatting versus styles” issues (for instance the F-keys versus Cmd-I and Cmd-B) are bound to be a problem [not only] for the beginners. I would love if some text processor would give up the ad-hoc formatting altogether, because this would significantly clean the way of thinking about the text and also the interface would get simpler (all the formatting palettes would go away and all you’ll get would be a simple list of character styles, paragraph styles and their variations). But I am aware that this could be considered too radical by some users.
FA1
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Post by FA1 »

verma wrote: The command-b or command-i are typically superficial or temporal commands: they remain untill you change the paragraph syle, for example. Changing a paragraph style, unfortunately, does occur - in those cases you lose the "face"-setting of the character. That can be quite annoying...

With the F-keys ("variation"), you give a permanent character style to those words/letters: even if the paragraph style later one changes, you can be sure that those elements you F-marked as bold or italic, stay the way you wanted them to be.

All in all, the F-key mapping is a very, very lovely feature, imho.
I realize that you may want bold and italic to remain if the paragraph styles change, but why not have cmd-b and cmd-i do it and have the F-keys be ad hoc? (I'm not sure why you'd ever want ad hoc changes, as zoul says) In MS Word, isn't it the case that changes made with cmd i and b remain if you change styles?
nicka
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Post by nicka »

I still don't understand the advantage of having the F-keys for bold and italics that remain with style changes, instead of having the command keys do so.
I agree with this.
With the F-keys ("variation"), you give a permanent character style to those words/letters: even if the paragraph style later one changes, you can be sure that those elements you F-marked as bold or italic, stay the way you wanted them to be.

All in all, the F-key mapping is a very, very lovely feature, imho.
And with this!

I've said this before, but once more:
Why not the best of both worlds? Why not allow users to map Command-b, Command-i etc to character style variations, as a preference?

In fact I think this should be set up to work this way by default, with suitable character style variations in each provided character style, but this seems less important the basic issue of giving users the choice to use the familiar shortcuts for the proper way in Mellel of doing italics and bold etc..
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