bluesdance wrote:-In a table, arrows (i.e. "up" and "down") don't navigate between cells
True, however the standard form for moving through table cells (Tab and Shift+Tab) both work as expected. Also, in keeping with keeping the Tab shortcuts from moving from cell to cell, they also maintain all of their normal standard Cocoa text behaviors (except Emacs keybindings) that you expect, and don't quite work as expected in Word.
-No support for importing MS Word comments
No real surprise here, as Mellel does not support comments of any sort. Hopefully comments will be added with full marginalia support in a future release, but at the moment it's not a huge deal–breaker for me (perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'm not certain).
-No vertical page justification (i.e. putting major titles in the vertical middle of a page)
This is actually a little annoying, however managing sections, page styles, and Auto–Titles, this is easily workable, and quite a bit more manageable and semantic than Word's idea of style management.
-Sometimes and randomly, keyboard shortcuts for italics (command-I) and bold (command-B) stop working, even though I can apply those formattings by using the mouse on the formatting panel
Not to sound condescending, but the proper way to use bold and italic font alternants is to create a style variant, and switch using the built–in style mechanism;
ad hoc styling with Cmd + [B,I] is not the preferred way of managing things in Mellel, and can cause you great annoyances in the future if you need to restyle your document. You'd be best served by spending a day reading up on Mellel's style system, and creating a Style Set or three to suit your needs. (Trust me, it is well worth the time to create a full Style Set to suit your needs, than to spend many wasted moments restyling your document every time you make a change.)
While I am not trying to be an apologist, these shortcomings are well noted and loathed. Specifically, comments and marginalia (such as note streams in the margins, perhaps even different column widths in sections, as well as vertical alignment/agreement/anchoring between paragraphs in columns, as well as line/paragraph numbering) are sorely needed. Yet, it is our belief that when one aspect of marginalia is added, most all of the others will follow, as they will most likely use the same underlying architectural changes needed to make it happen. Also, when such changes occur, it will be in a superior manner that will be in keeping with the rest of the program.
As I previously stated, creative use of Auto–Titles, page styles and section styles can approximate vertical justification for titles and sub-titles (as I've done for several papers), but it is not an exact science. However, an added bonus to this is that Mellel's style system is far more consistent than Word's could ever hope to be, and the structure through Mellel's Auto–Titles is also far easier to manage than Word's.
Your grumblings about table cell navigation is understandable, however I feel that its present state is quite acceptable. Also, other than supporting Emacs keybindings like a standard Cocoa NSTextEdit control, Mellel's table cells support all of the other standard keyboard navigation shortcuts, including Opt and/or Cmd + [Arrow], with or without the Shift modifier. This is merely a learning step/retraining you need to take when moving from Word.
Similarly, the use of the Cmd + [B,I] shortcuts for bold and/or italic faces are a habit you should break yourself of if you wish to be more productive in Mellel. Mellel has an amazing style system, but
ad hoc changes such as those can cause confusing results. For example, if you have a paragraph with a few selected phrases that you placed in italics with the Cmd+I shortcut, but originally started your paragraph in a base style, this may cause problems. In the aforementioned situation, if you change any aspect of your character or paragraph style that included selected phrases in italics via Cmd+I, then all of those passages will change to whatever the format indicated in the new base style is. I recommend reading the Mellel Guide, as well as some of the very well put–together mini–guides to understand the way Mellel does things.
This is not meant to be a rude or condescending post. I apologize if that is how it has come across to you. However, Mellel does introduce a slightly different paradigm to word processing that is not followed by many (if any) other word processors on the market right now. While it does serve a niche market of sorts, it is quite capable and versatile; those who wish to invest a little bit of time learning Mellel's styles and inner workings will be well rewarded with greater productivity and beautiful documents.
(As an aside, earlier this week I spent nearly 30 minutes trying to help my mother how to change the default spacing after paragraphs for the normal document template in MS Word 2008 on her new iMac. It was easy to change for the current document, but rather convoluted to change for the default template used for new documents. Perhaps it is because I personally am used to Mellel, but she's been using Word on PCs since Word 6 on Windows 3.1 days, and she still couldn't find it easily, so I don't think it was just me. Mellel just represents a slightly more structured paradigm to your word processing workflow, but also helps you to stay a bit more organized, too, I believe.)
(Wow … who knew this brief response was going to turn into a tome …)