Goodbye Microsoft 2008; bring it on Mellel!

[sloosley]

It's official: not RTL in Office 2008.

So, come on Mellel. We're counting on you more than ever to give us what we need.

Bring it on!
SL

PS If you wonder what it is that "we need," just peruse this forum. The sum of the voices says it all.

[dstay]

I got another 2 months before I start my dissertation and I hope textflow arround images and cross references are sorted out by then.

[jannuss]

I got another 2 months before I start my dissertation and I hope textflow arround images and cross references are sorted out by then.

Cross references have been promised for version 2.5.

As for text around images. Tables offer an acceptable work-around.

Janet

[macsailor]

It's official: not RTL in Office 2008.

Strange that Microsoft has not implemented the RTL feature in their new Office 2008.

[aechallu]

I got another 2 months before I start my dissertation and I hope textflow arround images and cross references are sorted out by then.

dstay: Do your university's dissertation guidelines mandate text wrapping around images? If not, why bother? Even if Mellel had the functionality (and it should), I'd stay away from it for a dissertation (readability and optical reproduction of the text is a major concern and for that reason guidelines typically not just discourage but forbid the use of textflowing around images). And cross-references will be great in 2.5, but in the meanwhile markers facilitate your work a lot as you can cycle through them. The time involved in manually solving my xrefs was negligible in a diss. shy of 400 pages, but that depends on how much fine-grained your xrefs are and how often you use them. I mean, I didn't think that lack of xrefs or textflow around images impaired my dissertation writing in any way. Actually it helped me focus on what I really needed to do, which was to write and reflect on what I was writing without much concern on the technology.

[pds1602]

I got another 2 months before I start my dissertation and I hope textflow arround images and cross references are sorted out by then.

Cross references have been promised for version 2.5.

As for text around images. Tables offer an acceptable work-around.

Janet

Cross references have been promised for around 3 years now. Don't hold your breath...

[jannuss]

Cross references have been promised for around 3 years now. Don't hold your breath...

From Ori's post of 7 January 2008:

The status on Mellel is the following:
A. We're now in advanced alpha testing for Mellel 2.5. The main attraction (not the only one there, but the main one) is cross references.

[pds1602]

I got another 2 months before I start my dissertation and I hope textflow arround images and cross references are sorted out by then.

As much as I would like to use Mellel the lack of cross references and the really difficult multiple table of contents support has pushed me to latex, which produces the best output BTW.

I also have word 2008 but think I'll stay with latex for my thesis. Word 2008 is very very good BTW but, like Mellel, just misses it for academic writing (at least until endnote or another bibliography manager is released for 2008).

[pds1602]

Cross references have been promised for around 3 years now. Don't hold your breath...

From Ori's post of 7 January 2008:

The status on Mellel is the following:
A. We're now in advanced alpha testing for Mellel 2.5. The main attraction (not the only one there, but the main one) is cross references.

I'm afraid I've heard it all before...

[Phil82]

I'm afraid I've heard it all before...

And from what I gather is the general attitude of people visiting these boards, I'd be a fool to invest money in what a software "promises" to do in the future. Instead, I should buy software for what it does right now. I've been waiting for cross references for nearly 18 months.

My advise to anyone starting a dissertation is to stay away from Mellel until it contains the functionality you require. Do not expect them the Redlers to meet any deadline that they've set. Do not settle for promised features.

[palazzo]

Text flow around images is a must for good print layout, and not only to make "cute" image insets. What if I have to leave 3/4 of a page blank because I want to insert a full-page picture at a certain point in my text? The reader will certainly think this is the end of the chapter, only to find out that the text resumes after the image… I am writing my diss. in Mellel but will take it to Pages for final formatting because of that.

[nicka]

What if I have to leave 3/4 of a page blank because I want to insert a full-page picture at a certain point in my text?

Text flow around images is a possible solution. Another one is some kind of float system as in LaTeX. The full-page picture just gets put on the next suitable page after the place in the text where it is introduced, and there is no need for a half-empty page before the picture. It would be lovely to have this after we get cross-references.

[shmulik]

I also have word 2008 but think I'll stay with latex for my thesis. Word 2008 is very very good BTW but, like Mellel, just misses it for academic writing (at least until endnote or another bibliography manager is released for 2008).

Tell me about it. I've switched to Word because I discovered the fantastic Zotero (which has Word and OpenOffice/NeoOffice plugins), but I guess Word 2008 has major problems in dealing with things like Endnote and Zotero. While the Zotero developers try to figure it out, I dug out my copy of Word X.

As for Mellel, I'll keep following it. I was sort of hoping that it would eventually become a Mac OSX version of Nota Bene. If it ever does, I'll be back in a jiff. It seems that most of the features that users want however, are really different from the Nota Bene feature set (a lot of them concern typesetting and so on, which I think recommends the use of LaTeX anyway). For now, the Zotero/Word (or Zotero/OpenOffice) combination looks like the best way of doing manuscripts in the humanities. LaTeX is beautiful--and I think, fun to use--but I have to submit RTFs or docs to journals and such (with minimal formatting), so it's kind of overkill for me, and then I have to convert manuscripts to rtf, which isn't easy or pretty.

Anyway, my point was, have a look back at Zotero in a couple of months and see if they haven't released a plugin for Word 2008.

[suavito]

I don't use Word so I don't know if this is really a solution for your problems with the Word/Bookends combo but maybe it is of some use:

NEW in Version 10.1.3
• Word 2008 compatibility
A Bookends hierarchical menu under the Word 2008 menu Script icon contains five scripts: Find In Bookends, Go To Bookends, Insert Citation, Scan Document, Unscan Document. They provide the same functionality as the corresonding options in the Tools menu of earlier versions of Word. You can move these scripts out of the Bookends hierarchical menu and/or rename them, and they will still work.
http://www.sonnysoftware.com/newfeatures.html

[Sheamus]

My wife's dissertation requires text wrapping around photographs and drawings. Based on comments in this thread it appears text wrapping functionality does not currently exist within Mellel. Is my understanding accurate? If so, will Mellel 2.5 have text wrapping?