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Is it possible to have character spacing and mellel?

If you mean to manually adjust intercharacter spacing, I do not believe this is presently possible. The best way I know around this limitation is using a font family with a full set of opticals, such as different faces for captions, text, headings, titling, &c.

True, it's not possible.

Well-designed typefaces and ones with different optical sizes (e.g. these ones from Adobe) certainly make the lack less glaring, but there are times when good typographic design requires letter-spacing: most times small caps are used, for example. See Bringhurst, quoted at the top of this page.

If, as seems unlikely, Mellel is not to have character spacing, is QuarkXPress compatible with Mellel? That is, can I take text, including footnotes and quotations of poetry and the like, from Mellel to Quark?

I read a week to two ago what I reckoned was the near-perfectly designed book: Michael Innes' Operation Pax (Gollancz, 1951). The font was Baskerville, largely indistinguishable from Monotype's offering—if not precisely that—and the character spacing was all that I could wish for. Wonderful. And, as always by this particular Innes, a good novel to boot.

So that's the object.

Regards,

c paul b

c paul b wrote:If, as seems unlikely, Mellel is not to have character spacing, is QuarkXPress compatible with Mellel? That is, can I take text, including footnotes and quotations of poetry and the like, from Mellel to Quark?

I read a week to two ago what I reckoned was the near-perfectly designed book: Michael Innes' Operation Pax (Gollancz, 1951). The font was Baskerville, largely indistinguishable from Monotype's offering—if not precisely that—and the character spacing was all that I could wish for. Wonderful. And, as always by this particular Innes, a good novel to boot.

So that's the object.

Regards,

c paul b

You can export to RTF, which will retain most formatting. However, finer points such as note streams, cross-references and auto-titles may not be fully supported by the export.

Splendid. Many thanks.

c paul b