Mellel and OmniOutliner, best practice?

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jbq
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Mellel and OmniOutliner, best practice?

Post by jbq »

Is there someone out there who has established a workflow integrating Mellel and Omni Outliner?
I'm aware of some (not so happy) discussions regarding the interplay between Scrivener and Mellel, but now I am interested in hints on how to work with OO and Mellel - not only from OO to Mellel, but the other way round, too. (E.g.: Mellel's OPML is not working for me, but that might be my fault.)

Thanks for sharing!
JBQ
ozean
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Re: Mellel and OmniOutliner, best practice?

Post by ozean »

I fear that I don’t have that much to contribute here, other than that I also use this setup. I usually just keep them open side by side and switch back and forth. (I use OO for organization and related notes and ideas. The actual writing is then done pretty much exclusively in Mellel.) But I too would be delighted to hear how others handle this combination of software! :)
macsailor
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Re: Mellel and OmniOutliner, best practice?

Post by macsailor »

Sorry for a late reply, but in my experience, Mellel and OmniOutliner 3 is working very well, but OO4 does not open OPML files exported from Mellel if you check the Export Content as Notes option. The support at Omnigroup told me the following reason for this behaviour:

»It's a bad XML code:  But if you open the raw file (e.g. by dragging it to TextEdit) you should be able to remove that string from near the end of the file, which would fix it.»

No version of OO4 is able to open the OPML file exported from Mellel if you if you check the Export Content as Notes option, but OO3 will open it without any problems at all. I do not know if the guys at Redlex has to change their code or if the guys at OmniGroup has to handle that type of bad XML more gracefully, like in version 3. I have asked the guys at OmniGroup already one year ago, but they have not been able to fix the way OO4 handles the bad XML mentioned above.

A part from this, I believe it's a good combination to be able to use OO3 and Mellel. I haven't used this combination for a while, but when I wrote my bachelor thesis some years ago, I had a working workflow.
Peter Edwardsson
..............................
Truth is not always popular, but it is always right.
macsailor
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Location: Linköping, Sweden

Re: Mellel and OmniOutliner, best practice?

Post by macsailor »

In the latest beta of Mellel, Redlers has fixed the bad XML code mentioned in my previous reply. That's really good news!
Peter Edwardsson
..............................
Truth is not always popular, but it is always right.
jbq
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Re: Mellel and OmniOutliner, best practice?

Post by jbq »

I am on the beta program, too, but missed this point.
Thanks for pointing that out!
JBQ
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