Should I use Mellel to Write a Book?

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Boban
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Should I use Mellel to Write a Book?

Post by Boban »

I am writing an academic (research) book. Should I switch from Word/EN to Mellel/Bookends? I would love to hear from some who have similar experiences.

Boban
joewiz
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Re: Should I use Mellel to Write a Book?

Post by joewiz »

Boban wrote:I am writing an academic (research) book. Should I switch from Word/EN to Mellel/Bookends? I would love to hear from some who have similar experiences.
What is your subject? Languages used? Special typographic needs, such as equations, or just text? Charts and tables? What style guide and citation format are you conforming to? Please give us an idea of your content, and folks here will try to give you an idea of what you can expect.
Boban
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Post by Boban »

Music History. Main language will be English with quite a lot of Czech and some German too. I'll make the music example in another app and import the tiffs or EPS files. The style guide will be (all derived from Chicago) OUP/CUP – still waiting for final details.
ochsenmeier
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Post by ochsenmeier »

If you write about music, I would definitely consider switching to LaTeX. It has packages to write music scores quite painlessly. The bibliography can be handled by BibTeX. CUP uses Latex for some of its publications and Cambridge University has lots of resources for LaTeX at http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/
The learning curve is a little bit steep for a week, that's really it, unless you write maths. The learning curve won't be much harder than getting used to Mellel's idiosyncratic ways. LaTeX and BibTeX are free by the way and can handle multilanguages without any problems.
Otherwise you can always use BE with Word. I have been using Mellel for a few weeks quite extensively (coming from Word, Framemaker, and InDesign). I would, at this stage, not write a book with Mellel (or Word for that matter) unless it implements serious cross-referencing and indexing, among other things. But I understand that it depends on your needs and, not to forget, your publisher's requirements!
Erwin
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ochsenmeier
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Post by ochsenmeier »

As I said, it all depends on what you want to do. If you want to write a text with music scores, I would use Latex since it does it beautifully and easily. As far as loading packages in Latex, it pretty much does it for you and you only do it once.
If you need serious indexing, Mellel will not do it at this stage (unless you write in Mellel and use a indexing software or transfer to another software at the end). If you don't and your publisher accepts Mellel texts or the pdf it produces, go for it. I use it to write extensive course notes, and it works better than Word. On the other hand, I wrote a book with Framemaker that I could not have written with Mellel. I am now writing one in InDesign because I need its typographic and graphic capabilities.
So again, there is (unfortunately) no text writing tool that is suitable for every single project.
Erwin
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Boban
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Post by Boban »

Thanks for these helpful responses. I think that Word does have an indexing and cross-referencing feature. LaTex has been suggested to me (I have been teaching in Cambridge for a number of years, but never used it), but I wonder how much it matters, to some extent. What I mean is that most publishing houses turn your text over to designers and layout specialists anyway (Erwin, you are hard core to write straight into InDesign!). I have sent Word files to OUP and got back something that looked totally different (of couse), so why spend so much time with very fine details of layout?

I do like the easy feel of Mellel and find that the styles are much easier to deal with than Word. I am using EndNote with Word at the moment and have really grown to love the cite-while-you-write feature. It has been suggested on the Bookends forum that there might be CWYW-type feature in Mellel before too long.

Maria, I have yet to try the outlining feature. Perhaps there is tutorial in the guide. I can't spend too much time fussing around with lots of different apps (thought it is fun), but I'm intrigued by the idea of an outlining feature.

Thanks.
alexwein
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Post by alexwein »

Hi. I thought I'd add my two cents to this discussion, since I am writing an academic book, of sorts, in Mellel (my dissertation) and find its outlining capabilities to be invaluable. In Word, I was constantly frustrated by having to divide my chapters into separate files, since I never felt comfortable with having such a huge document all in one file and there was no way to manage something as complex within Word. With Mellel, this has completely changed. The outlining feature, for me, is a powerful and elegant way to manage a huge project (my dissertation is up to 297 pages including endnotes) since it gives me the ability to (1) visually see all the elements of my dissertation all in one 'gestalt' (chapters, sections, subsections) as well as (2) manage them quickly and easily (move them about as needed, change their place in the hierarchy, etc.). I can also easily (3) add new or possible new sections, try out different possible structures, etc. There are probably reasons (4) and (5) and beyond as well, but I can't think of them right off. :)

I also use Mellel's ability to easily create and manage multiple note streams (I have different streams for different kinds of quotes--mostly just two, quotes that open chapters versus quotes within the body of the text). Very wonderful.

There are ways that Mellel can be a cumbersome to use, but it's power in managing large and complex projects overshadows its shortcomings, at least for me. And I have had no trouble easily converting Mellel files into Word files for my readers, though others have had some issues there when using style variations, etc. I don't know the status of those issues since the latest version of Mellel was released, however.

So to answer the question you asked at the beginning of this thread: I heartily recommend Mellel for writing a book, most especially for an academic project. I know nothing at all about the musical score aspect of your project, so can't make any comments in that regard.

I do also use Bookends for reference management and find it quite useful. I've modified the Chicago (B, I think, can't remember offhand) format that came with it to perfectly meet my needs, though I think for most the formats provided would prove adequate. I like it much better than Endnote. It's more intuitive and easy to use, but without sacrificing power of usage.

So those are my thoughts. Hope it helps, and best of luck!

Alexandria

PS Like Maria, I am using Scrivener now for idea development, including book projects, and the writing of shorter and/or less complex projects (such as fiction, which doesn't require foot/endnotes). It is a fantastic writing program that meets most of my writing/project development needs. But I still use Mellel for anything requiring a complex note (footnote/endnote) structure or when a project needs to be brought together and polished off.
Timotheus
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Post by Timotheus »

I second everything Maria and Alexandria have said.
fitzgunnar
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Post by fitzgunnar »

Boban,

the greatest advantage of Mellel over Word, as I see it, is that Mellel is so much more stable and fast. I recently wrote a 370 pages book in Mellel, and never had any stability or speed problems at all. (Well, towards the end it took a few seconds to open the document.) Last time I tried opening a 100+ pages document in Word I gave up after a few minutes.

The greatest advantage of Mellel over Word as regards writing a book is that there is no cross-referencing in Mellel. They say it will be there soon, but I have waited for a year and a half... On the other hand, if you do not have many cross-references, you can handle them manually. (I had to handle some 350 cross-references manually – that was a pain!)

/MagnusG!
ochsenmeier
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Post by ochsenmeier »

Boban,
Rest assured, I am not writing in InDesign. I write the text in RTF, mostly in Mellel (or Word if I have to switch computer), then I place the whole text in InDesign and go from there.
I agree with the positive reviews of the outline and long document capabilities of Mellel, so much better than Word. It really is not that hard to learn and is worth the time invested.
If you are lucky enough not to have to worry about design, formatting, and indexing then your choices are easier to make.
My last thought on this thread is that I cannot consider writing a book in its final form in Mellel because I need cross references now, multiple indexing (authors, references, subjects, tables, figures), multilingual capabilities (with such basic feature as the ability to associate a language with a character style, see the thread on this), macro writing (very useful for long documents), association of page style with paragraph style, etc. None of which, at this stage and unless I am mistaken (which I might be), I can do in Mellel. Again, it all depends on your needs and preferences.

Erwin
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Marco
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writing "musical symbols" with Unicode

Post by Marco »

Boban:

apart from more feature that make Mellel good to write a book, there is one that is very valuable to me: Mellel is Unicode savvy.

You can consider writing your musical annotations with the Unicode block dedicated to "Musical symbols". You can find a description of it at: http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf

You would need a Unicode font that includes that particular block. Then you would also need an imput method. I can't suggest a specific solution, but I think it can be done. It would work in Mellel just like entering text in polytonic Greek, or Hebrew.

Marco
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Post by joewiz »

Boban wrote:Music History. Main language will be English with quite a lot of Czech and some German too.
Mellel will be wonderful to work with, on this front.
Boban wrote:I'll make the music example in another app and import the tiffs or EPS files.
Just be aware that Mellel doesn't have a way to allow text to flow around images yet. If you want an image to be side-by-side with text, you need to use tables as a work around. That can be really annoying.
Boban wrote:The style guide will be (all derived from Chicago) OUP/CUP – still waiting for final details.
I think you'll find that Bookends does a great job and is very flexible.

So, in sum, I think Mellel will be well suited to your project. There may be some things, like text flow around images, that make parts of the project annoying. One way to see what Mellel lacks compared to Word is by looking at the Competitive Comparison that the Redlers compiled:

http://www.redlers.com/mellelcompetitive.html

It rates Mellel, Word, and two other applications, on very specific features. I'd suggest giving it a browse; then give Mellel a spin. Also download the Mellel Guide, read the section on styles closely, and keep the Guide close by as you work on the project.

http://www.redlers.com/download.html

Let us know if you have questions along the way.
Boban
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Post by Boban »

Thanks again for all the replies. At this point I think that I will leave Mellel and Bookends (demos) on my computer and wait and see what happens around the time of the Word 2007 'upgrade'. At that point I will either emigrate to Mellel or keep trudging the hard road of Word. In the meantime I will keeping messinga round with Mellel to continue to get a better feel for it so when the time comes I'm better placed to make a decision.
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