Good to see that there is still a lively community around Mellel and that the Redlers have plans for Mellel's future. As other contributions to this thread have stated, Mellel is still the only software with certain features that many of us find vital.
Eyal wrote:
We might also add more export formats which may focus more on getting the content and meaning of the document rather then the appearance (which is what RTF and especially PDF are all about)
I think this is a great idea. Two thoughts:
1) if
Mellel's XML format were documented then other people could write convertors to LaTeX, rtf, doc, docx etc. etc.
2) I think that rtf
with named styles (particularly paragraph styles) is probably the best way right now to transmit content and meaning. It's the only near-ubiquitous, documented, semantically marked-up format for text documents (to my knowledge). But export to doc or docx
with named styles would do almost as well because other applications can convert between these three formats. The main thing is some way of exporting from Mellel that preserves style names.
rtf is not just, or even mainly, about preserving the appearance of text documents, but about storing the text with the meaning that is important to any sort of structured writing: what is a top-level heading, what is a second-level heading, what is body text, what is a blockquote, what is a footnote, an endnote, a page header, a page footer. Mellel's rtf export preserves the last four pieces of information but obliterates the first four.