Editable PDF file from Mellel

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Would you like to see Mellel have an editable PDF feature (like Papyrus 12)?

Poll ended at Sun Dec 10, 2006 4:29 pm

Definitely- this would be awesome!
12
40%
Sounds great, but not a high priority
6
20%
I'd rather see continued work on .doc export
6
20%
no thanks
6
20%
 
Total votes: 30

danzac

Editable PDF file from Mellel

Post by danzac »

I have been reading up a little bit on Papyrus 12. While I am not switching from Mellel, Papyrus has a few great features that I would like to see in Mellel, like-
~ sticky notes that can be 'pinned' anywhere in the document (this would be a good help for the editing process and the writing process in general)
~ A really good spell-checker
~ table calculations (not a big deal, but handy to have!)

However, what really makes Papyrus stand out now is there new PAP/PDF hybrid files. (details are here.) It is essentially a hybrid PDF that is both a PDF file (fully readable in adobe/preview) but also retains the text of the Papyrus file and can be opened and edited in Papyrus. PDF's are now a two-way street for Papyrus users. There is nothing else to say except "FRIGGIN AWESOME!!"

There are 2 main reasons why I would REALLY REALLY like to see this put at the top of the development list for Mellel. (at the very top of my list still sits cross-referencing)

1) As Mellel users we are continually wrestling with exchange between other computers and other people. PDF is one of those universal formats that we can trust to get to anyone we need. The reality of my world is that I am sending my Mellel created documents to colleagues in PDF 90% of the time (the other 10% is .rtf). If Mellel had this feature, it would be my default format for saving, bar none.
2) I am a hardcore DEVONthink user. DEVONthink and the redlers have chosen not to collaborate together despite some of their user's desperate pleas. This is a way to bridge that gap. I would now be able to see my Mellel-created documents in DEVONthink, and if I needed to alter the document, a single click on the hybrid MELL/PDF file in the DT database would open Mellel to edit it. (In fact, the DT forum support is now recommending Papyrus to its users for precisely this reason- see here.)

Mellel still kicks Papyrus's ass as far as I'm concerned, but we can still learn from them in this regard. And i got no problem stealing someone else's idea if it will make my life easier and more enjoyable.
FA1
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Post by FA1 »

I have no particular objections, but I'm just wondering, if no one else (in other apps) could make changes to the hybrid pdf that you send, then what is the advantage? (Aside from the Devonthink issue) It seems no different than sending out a regular pdf now, unless the only difference is actually the step of going from Mellel format to pdf (which would be trivial).

The problem with sending files that I have (if someone is editing or collaborating) is that once someone else edits it in Word, I've lost my styles and auto-titles if I want to use Mellel again (and Replace Styles is a pain in the arse when it probably shouldn't be, see my request:
http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?t=683 )
mwdiers
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Post by mwdiers »

Actually, this answers one concern which I have had in the past with Mellel: namely, that without access to Mellel, I cannot read my documents. If such a hybrid format were easily possible, this concern would be eliminated in such a manner that not only will the text of the document be available, but all of its formatting retained as well.

It's the lazy-man's option. I would not have to save twice: once to PDF, and once to .mellel

Since the advent of Mellel 2.1, my main objection to Mellel's format has been eliminated: I no longer have to worry about being able to access my old documents once Mellel is gone. I'm talking ten to twenty years down the road. Worst-case scenario is that I will lose all the style info, but the text will be retained via XML. And I would presume that even twenty years from now, I would be able to write an XSLT transformation to convert my existing Mellel docs into whatever the latest-greatest standard format of the day is.

I currently HAVE this problem with old Word for DOS documents that I don't want to throw away, but cannot currently read. I keep hoping I will find an old copy of Word for DOS in some dark corner of the Internet, that will run on an emulator, allowing me to convert all those valuable (to me, anyway) files, into RTF, and thus preserve them.
Phil82
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Post by Phil82 »

I agree. This feature would be amazing, especially as it will guarantee that your documents will still be readable 20+ years down the road.
zoul
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Post by zoul »

Phil82 wrote:I agree. This feature would be amazing, especially as it will guarantee that your documents will still be readable 20+ years down the road.
That’s already granted by the current XML file format.
aechallu
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Post by aechallu »

Phil82 wrote:
I agree. This feature would be amazing, especially as it will guarantee that your documents will still be readable 20+ years down the road.

That’s already granted by the current XML file format.
Actually, I think Phil82 has a good point. Mellel's XML would be embedded in the PDF (and probably compressed). Even if the information necessary to interpret the blurb is included as metadata in the PDF, it would be hard for a lay user to extract the information. Bottomline: Having the file in PDF would assure readibility of all the formatting, but recovering the info necessary to edit the file would be difficult to accomplish for a lay user.

That said, we're much better off having the possibility of a PDF hybrid: we get the same XML + the PDF.
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Post by zoul »

Currently the XML information can be accessed directly, because the file format is actually a directory with an XML file and all the data inside. This is a huge advantage, because all the data can be easily processed in a traditional Unix way – you can transform Mellel documents using a simple shell script! Everything else seems to be a step backwards from the point of the data accesibility.

Embedding the XML (plus images and other data) into a PDF would make both Mellel code and the data accesibility more complicated. Plus, there would be almost certainly issues with the PDF, like some applications stripping the editable data and so forth. Next, there will be conceptual issues for beginners, like “I cannot edit this PDF in Mellel, why?”, “Mellel is a PDF editor”, “How can I tell editable PDF from non-editable PDF” and so forth.

The “hybrid PDF” idea minus the coolness factor IMHO does not justify the changes that would have to be done in the Mellel code and the disadvantages it would bring.

By the way, the Papyrus blurb about the Hybrid PDF is quite an example of marketing speech, how about this: “The PAP/PDF Format should be especially interesting for anyone who needs to archive documents. Until now, there has never been a universal format that could be so easily modified and updated.” What does that mean? You still cannot edit the PDF using anything else than the Papyrus. And, if you archive the document using this beast, then after some 20 years you’ll be stuck with some kind of opaque binary blob. I don’t call that archiving…

[Just my point of view, of course.]
Phil82
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Post by Phil82 »

What happens when you have a document that embeds some images? I assume that these will be in some binary form within a block of XML? That's going to make it hard to recover the data, especially 20 years down the road if Mellel is no longer around.

If the document were in PDF on the other hand....

p.s. I guess this is a rather moot point, as I make PDFs of all my documents anyway. Still it would be nice to have editable PDFs :D
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Post by nicka »

What happens when you have a document that embeds some images? I assume that these will be in some binary form within a block of XML?
No, they are stored as image files in standard formats within the Mellel package. (You can see them if you right-click a .mellel file in the Finder and choose 'Show package contents'. If the Mellel document contains images then there will be a folder in the package called 'Images'. They are in there.)

Two related points:
1) some of what is requested here could be accomplished by having a preference in Mellel that generates a separate pdf (or rtf) automatically every time the Mellel file is saved.
2) for me the priority for Mellel's pdf support is automatic generation of clickable hyperlinks for the table of contents, notes, cross-references etc. Papyrus does this now and it is quite tempting -- much more so than so-called editable pdfs, for me at least.
danzac

Post by danzac »

there will be conceptual issues for beginners, like “I cannot edit this PDF in Mellel, why?”, “Mellel is a PDF editor”, “How can I tell editable PDF from non-editable PDF” and so forth.
I disagree. It would just need to be made clear that Mellel can edit .MELL.PDF files, not any PDF file. A simple way to figure out if a PDF is editable- does it have .MELL before the .PDF extension? That doesn't seem to hard.

At bottom we are talking about the issue of compatability and accessability, right? In my estimation, the hybrid PDF file is the best addess of this. If you do not like this idea Zoul, give me a better idea I can get behind. Being an xml file is great for long-term access, but I still can't send these great xml files to anyone else who doesn't run Mellel.

Danny
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Post by aechallu »

nicka wrote: 1) some of what is requested here could be accomplished by having a preference in Mellel that generates a separate pdf (or rtf) automatically every time the Mellel file is saved.
2) for me the priority for Mellel's pdf support is automatic generation of clickable hyperlinks for the table of contents, notes, cross-references etc. Papyrus does this now and it is quite tempting -- much more so than so-called editable pdfs, for me at least.
An automatic backup in RTF/PDF would be nice; especially if one can point to a default folder in the preferences window (this way one can process the pdf/rtf through a folder action and make it available to your favorite scrapboo---I mean ideas organizer application).

I like the hybrid concept a lot. But I think that it's better to have better exporting capabilities first, before thinking on extending functionality. Hyperlinkable PDFs and style-sensitive RTFs should be at the top.
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