and on to 3.1

[Flo]

Thanks for this update and for the effort to improve Mellel – also in unexpected ways: e.g. live bibliography struck me first as something unusual, but it is a feature that I am constantly using now.

Concerning bibliography: I like the fact that the bibliography can now be placed and updated anywhere within the document. But unscanning/scanning (e.g. to change the bibliography style) places the bibliography again at the end of the document. One should be able to assign the bibliography a place in the document (e.g. by attaching a ‘bib anchor’ to an autotitle).

I strongly support Hans-Reinhard’s request for attaching captions to pictures and tables. One strength of Mellel is that changes can be applied to the whole document, at once, without having to recheck the entire document for (e.g.) ‘faulty’ layout changes. But e.g. when changing the size of a font, I have to check the entire document if the captions are not separated from the picture. Any feature that makes such tedious tasks obsolete is welcome. The table flow across several pages is something similar: automated repetition of top rows and columns would make this much easier; an option to have automatically added a field at the bottom of the table ‘continued on next page’ or something similar (optional for even and/or odd pages) would be great (by the way: in the TOC, the auto-title I use as caption for multi-pages tables gives me, of course, but not very useful, the page where the table ends, not where it begins). Finally, it is important to keep the program stable and fast for working with long documents.

There are other features, of course, many of them listed above. But on top of my head is currently the fact that we most probably will be writing more and more for digital publications, not printed ones (whether we like it or not; some publishing houses offer now the digital download of entire books). To keep up with other publishing formats, I think one should consider features that make digital reading more useful, such as internal and external links (usable in a pdf, for instance, to quickly navigate in a book or article), as nicka has pointed out above, or dynamic content such as animated graphics, videos, or live previews of websites. Although this is not the most urgent feature I need, I think it would really add to the reading experience of documents produced with Mellel. Of course, one should then also be able to jump from an INDEX entry to the place in the text.

[harryhoffner]

These are features I consider important to be added to the next version.

.docx import/export. I agree with many that this is high priority.

Flo writes: "Concerning bibliography: I like the fact that the bibliography can now be placed and updated anywhere within the document. But unscanning/scanning (e.g. to change the bibliography style) places the bibliography again at the end of the document. One should be able to assign the bibliography a place in the document (e.g. by attaching a ‘bib anchor’ to an autotitle)."

As for me, I would like to use the "Bibliography" pane in Mellel to insert citations, but there are two problems: (1) entries are under-differentiated if the same author has written two works in the same year, and (2) finding and selecting an entry is slow if you have to scroll down/up a long list of entries. To solve the first, (1) one needs more than just author + year in the display - one word might be enough, for the (2) second one should be able to type the first few letters of the author name in the bibliography pane and be taken to the entries immediately.

I second the request for support for multiple bibliographies (primary, secondary …) in one document

EndNote support on the same level as Bookends (and Sente). I see no reason to only support two bibliography programs well.

Pdf table of contents.

Links in pdfs for footnotes, endnotes and bibliography references, and therefore also within the Mellel document itself. I would like to be able to place the pointer on an endnote reference mark and have a window pop up with the content of the note.

Also weblinks in exported pdfs, and therefore also in the original Mellel doc, as nicka & flo also want, for ease of accessing web resources (dictionaries, Wikipedia, etc., in researching and writing the doc in Mellel.

All of these features would make writing long documents in Mellel much, much easier and productive.

[GediWorrier]

For me, while I love Mellel's structured document design approach, I scratch my head in puzzlement over why tables and auto-titles aren't in the Style Sets. It seems to be a natural progression—you should be able to style exactly how you want tables to appear within the Style Set. This goes for appearance (shading, lines, placement of caption, non-breaking, or repeating headers) and for text styles (heading, footing, stub, cell text). Similarly with auto-titles.

And I agree with linking captions with the objects. Yes, please.

The Gedi Worrier!

[Shaul]

I would like very much to have in 3.1 an indexing feature, or analytical index, to address in the document the points where a given topic is covered.

One thing more: I don't find the way to format the titles and the ToC. Where in the palette (or somewhere else) is the connection between the paragraph, the character and the auto-title? Now I format the titles one by one and this takes a lot of time.

Any answer will be appreciated. Many thanks.

Shaul

[Flo]

Is Mellel also meant to grant the reader who reads long documents digitally some flexibility, like adjusting the type size or even the font (like in the diverse book applications available)? A future 'Mellel reader' , mentioned by the Redlers in their outlook in one of the forum posts ('Mellel light', just for reading), might enable just that.

Then, the above wished improvement for layout features that obviate the need to recheck entire documents after one layout/typography change would come in handy; live toc would also make sense in this regard.

And how will an index look like if we only read documents digitally? Don’t people just use the 'search function' to find what they want? I know that a proper index provides more than just a listing of key words; but it needs to provide this 'additional' value even 'more' or better with digital documents—something that mostly depends on the content of the index, but maybe there’s also functionality on the Mellel side involved.

[nigel]

I would like to have place holders that report the word count between place holders.
I often have to write a 200 abstract and a 1000 word introduction. I would like to be able to insert these place holders and see the word count in each section as I write.
Thanks for listening to my meager wishes.
Nigel

[jannuss]

I would like to have place holders that report the word count between place holders.
Nigel

Nigel, the Statistics palette usually shows stats for the entire document
but
if you select a piece of text, stats for that piece will show up in parentheses next to the total stats.

Does this help?

Janet

[nicka]

It would be nice to be able to see the word count for a section without having to select the text. The best, I think, would be to have live word counts against items in the outline pane, but perhaps that would slow things down too much. A second-best way of doing this would be to have the word count available on demand for each item in the outline pane – e.g. by selecting an item, or by control-clicking.

[tika-tika]

Yes, Janet, we have floating images, but no way to add legends (captions) to our floating images, much more urgent than tex-like placement and definitely something needed in scientific texts (time and again mentioned on this forum)

For me, a multi-purpose solution here would be to allow text wrapping around both floating and inline tables. This way a user could make a one cell table and place the image and the caption in the cell. At the same time, this would satisfy those looking for floating tables or wishing to wrap around tables.

[daiyi]

Comments, please. It can't be that challenging after Track Changes was added, can it?

[tika-tika]

These are features I consider important to be added to the next version.

.docx import/export. I agree with many that this is high priority.

Flo writes: "Concerning bibliography: I like the fact that the bibliography can now be placed and updated anywhere within the document. But unscanning/scanning (e.g. to change the bibliography style) places the bibliography again at the end of the document. One should be able to assign the bibliography a place in the document (e.g. by attaching a ‘bib anchor’ to an autotitle)."

As for me, I would like to use the "Bibliography" pane in Mellel to insert citations, but there are two problems: (1) entries are under-differentiated if the same author has written two works in the same year, and (2) finding and selecting an entry is slow if you have to scroll down/up a long list of entries. To solve the first, (1) one needs more than just author + year in the display - one word might be enough, for the (2) second one should be able to type the first few letters of the author name in the bibliography pane and be taken to the entries immediately.

I second the request for support for multiple bibliographies (primary, secondary …) in one document

EndNote support on the same level as Bookends (and Sente). I see no reason to only support two bibliography programs well.

Pdf table of contents.

Links in pdfs for footnotes, endnotes and bibliography references, and therefore also within the Mellel document itself. I would like to be able to place the pointer on an endnote reference mark and have a window pop up with the content of the note.

Also weblinks in exported pdfs, and therefore also in the original Mellel doc, as nicka & flo also want, for ease of accessing web resources (dictionaries, Wikipedia, etc., in researching and writing the doc in Mellel.

All of these features would make writing long documents in Mellel much, much easier and productive.

Where is the "like" button when you need it?

Interestingly, I use Sente, so maybe its different in Bookends. Look at the Mellel box here http://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/c ... tions.html. There is more detail than just author and year.

Add to that multiple, and automatically updating TOC (ie, could make a separate TOC, list of figures, and list of tables with headings as such).