Feature Request: Master Document for book-length documents

Feature requests, and in-depth discussions of features and the way Mellel works

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harryhoffner
Read the guide, knows everything
Posts: 46
Joined: Wed Jun 03, 2009 9:07 pm

Feature Request: Master Document for book-length documents

Post by harryhoffner »

I have no desire to see Mellel become like MS Word: I like the way the Redlers currently do things. But there are a few capabilities that I had in MS Word that I would dearly love to have in Mellel. Experts can debate the best way to implement this. But when my book-length document is nearing completion, it has become so large that the responsiveness of the keys slows down considerably, causing two-key entries ('dead key' + base character) of special Unicode characters to become garbled. In other words the appearance on screen of what is typed is delayed to the point that words are all too often miswritten. In MS Word (but also of course in apps like Scrivener) one can work with smaller parts of a book-length text, so that responsiveness is instant, and yet these parts remain properly related to the whole, so that cross refs between them function properly. I would love to see something like this in Mellel. It would solve so many of my problems. I hope that others in the Mellel community feel the same way.
laup
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 311
Joined: Tue Aug 22, 2006 4:13 am
Location: Topanga, California

Re: Feature Request: Master Document for book-length documents

Post by laup »

How long is your manuscript and is it loaded with graphics? I ask because I've not seen problems with Mellel documents of 100 -200 pages. Usually, people rave about how well behaved Mellel is for big documents. No corruption problems, as in Word, and good performance. Are there any other special features that might be causing trouble, such as very large numbers of graphics?

Although I've not had any reason to do it with Mellel (as distinct from Word), what's the problem with modularizing your document and putting it together at the end, as I've long done with Word manuscripts? There is no Insert File option as in Word, so I guess you'd have to do that with Copy and Paste currently. Have you tried doing that, just to see whether the cross references all come into harmony when the document is put together? If that type of thing works, then I would think that Redlers could provide the Insert File option fairly easily.
Paul
harryhoffner
Read the guide, knows everything
Posts: 46
Joined: Wed Jun 03, 2009 9:07 pm

Re: Feature Request: Master Document for book-length documents

Post by harryhoffner »

My books are waaaaay larger than what you are thinking about. My last one was 2000 pages. And since they are technical, requiring internal cross references, which I like to be able to use while actually in the composition stages, I hate having to divide them into separate files. In Word with the Master Document set up you can inssert and use those cross references and links across the subdocuments.

But to answer your last question: yes, I have split the document, and at the end of a composition session reunited it by pasting one part into another; and, yes, the cross-references still worked after the reuniting. This was a discovery I made in desperation. I was glad that it worked, but I would have preferred to be able to keep the cross-refs and links across all pages of the large mss throughout the composing stage. The "insert file" feature would be a slight improvement.
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