Importing and Exporting Styles

[laup]

The subject of styles has been discussed previously, but I raise it again because iWork's Pages 08 seems to be able to import Word styles, allow writing in Pages using those styles, and allow exporting to Word in Word's styles. Can we expect that Mellel will be able to do similarly and, if so, in a reasonable period of time?

I haven't done any careful testing, but I did the following:
o Used Get Info to change an existing Word file to open in Pages. The file was of a journal article using the journal's Word styles. [I had to use the Get Info trick because for some reason Pages wouldn't otherwise open the document. A Leopard issue??]

o I opened the file in Pages. I looked at the styles drawer and confirmed that the styles had been imported. I then added a new style and made some trivial edits.

o I then exported to Word, and opened in Word. The document's Word styes were recognized, as was the new style!

Unless I am crazy, it would seem to me that Mellel has a great opportunity to do something similar and greatly mitigate collaboration problems, while still allow someone to use Mellel for the bulk of work because of its many virtues. I don't mean to minimize the difficulty of achieving this degree of compatibility (and Apple deserves credit), but isn't this an existence proof? By the way, I did nothing with rtf in the experiments.

[daiyi]

I, too, have found Pages to be quite compatible with Word docs. The comments feature works very well, and I like how Apple implemented it in Pages. But for me personally, Pages is still not there yet. Plus, it is slow and bloated.

At this point, I'm still willing to do some tweaking here and there in Word after exporting my Mellel documents. The process of writing, outlining, and citing is smoother for me in Mellel. So the little time spent making edits in Word is far offset by the pleasure of using Mellel to create those documents in the first place. That being said, I am eagerly awaiting Mellel 2.5.

[laup]

I didn't know that Pages was slow and bloated, which is a disappointment to hear, but in any case it's not yet up to the kind of writing that I do. Mellel is much better as yet (after climbing the learning curve). Unfortunately, Word compatibility is a big-deal issue for me because of (1) collaboration, (2) effective use of aides, and (3) a publication process that is accomplished in Word using standardized templates for document styles. The ability to import and export styles compatible with Word would be a great thing. In fact,for me it would be many times more important than cross referencing, which everyone wants and which is very, very important for others.

[daiyi]

I like Pages for what it does best, which is page layout. It's easy to make stunning flyers with it. On occasion, I also use it to make comments in Word documents and must admit it's made good progress the past few years. Although Pages opens faster than Word 2004 (on a Mactel), it's still much slower than Mellel in terms of launching. Pages weighs in at 183 MB after stripping out localizations and non PPC elements; it also produces rather large files. Although such sizes don't mean much with larger hard drives these days, it gives the impression of excess when compared to Mellel or even Word files and application sizes.