Importing old autotitle formats into Mellel 5.1

[sourdoughpablo]

I've been using Mellel for quite a while, and have my favorite autotitle streams/styles that I have used for various document types in the past. Now I'm using Mellel 5.1, and I can't find these old styles listed in the autotitle style dropdown list. When I open an older document, its autotitle style is preserved. But even if I modify and save this old documents autotitle style, I'm not offered the opportunity to apply that style to any other document I create.

This is quite a shift from the past, where the old autotitle styles gradually accumulated, and I couldn't figure out any way of deleting them from the dropdown list.

Is there any way that I can capture these old styles and add them to my choices for new documents, or do I have to recreate them from scratch?

[DavidH]

If you made these streams and styles before the advent of Mellel 5, they may simply be in the wrong application support folder. Autotitle streams, style sets, templates and the like are stored in named subfolders of the user application support folder. When Mellel went to version 5, its official name changed from Mellel to Mellel 5, and the new name brought with it a new application support folder. The easiest way to locate these folders is by typing the path names into the box that appears when you choose Go > Go to Folder … in the Finder. You need to locate old items you want to keep in

~/Library/Application Support/Mellel

and copy them into

~/Library/Application Support/Mellel 5

You can also visit the application support folder to weed out streams and style sets you no longer want.

[Amontillado]

DavidH is right on the money. Here's a few more thoughts.

Auto-titles are part of Mellel style sets.

It sounds like you are editing a style set that is local to a single document. Or, you may have the same style set local to a number of documents, but still local to each of those documents.

If you edit a local style set, changes are only made to the style set in that document. Other documents are not affected.

You've got a couple of choices, if that's the case.

Any time you duplicate a style set (in Styles->Edit style sets) the copy will be a global style set. As long as you don't switch the document to the new global copy, you can edit the global style set without affecting the current document or you can edit the local style set without changing the new global copy.

The other choice is possibly less conservative but may be what you want. You can click the globalize button on the current, local style set. Now, it's a global style set and available for any document.

Note that when you globalize a local style set, existing documents with the old, local version will continue to use the local version. I view that as a safety factor. Your formatting doesn't change unless you want it to.

If you want to make a global style set once again local to a single document, first select the style set to make it active in your document if it's not already.

Then, delete the global style set. You can't delete local style sets so there's not really any chance to delete the wrong one. Every document always has a local copy of the style set in use, so deleting a global style set doesn't harm documents that were using it. They just revert to using their local copies with no fuss.

[Eyal Redler]

I the past, Mellel used to have "Auto-title Setups", these were containers to the entire auto-title configuration: the formats, tag flows, and other settings.

This concept of "Auto-title setups" was very similar to a concept of styles but it wasn't quite there and due to historical reasons it remained separate from the style set (which includes settings for virtually every other aspect of a document).

This was problematic, however, because the setups contain references to styles (most obviously in the various formats) which mean that applying a setup on a document could introduce foreign styles (which would show up as diamonds). It also made things quite confusing as these setups were similar to styles, but not quite. There was no good reason, from a user point of view, to keep both concepts.

With Mellel 5.1 we introduced the concept of Auto-title styles which are essentially very similar to setups (with some differences) and are part of a style set. We also removed the setups as they were redundant. Unfortunately, it was not possible to convert the setups into styles because it was not possible to determine automatically which style set should receive them.

As I said, it wasn't possible to convert Auto-title setups into style automatically, but it is possible to do it manually and there's no need to re-create them from scratch.

You can open documents that use these autotitle setups and create an autotitle style based on them by clicking the "Create New Style" (+) button in the Auto-title/Styles palette, this will create a style based on the auto-title configuration (that is, all the autotitle releated settings, the formats etc) and add it to the style set.

If the style set to which you've added the new style is a global style set, it will be available to all the documents that use this style set, if the style set is not global (that is, belongs to a particular document) then this will be available only there.

So, if your "sharing styles between documents" strategy is based on a global style set, this is quite straight forward - open documents using your various auto-title setups and add an auto-title style based on these. If your sharing strategy is based on a default template, then you'll need to create these styles in the document style set, copy them to a fresh document using the default template and then save that document again as a template.