thinking of switching from Mellel

[scottwhitlock]

Hello Timotheus,

Yeah, sometimes we get a little adamant about Nisus, just as Melell users sometimes do the same for their product. I have a crush on Nisus, I must admit. But, for as much critical distance as I can muster, that is why I was also sure to say that NWP is by no means perfect, which as you've seen its users can also be very vocal about in these forums.

I am interested in knowing what you think of Scrivener. I've been using it for some complex papers I've been writing, and have found it to work nicely at just what you described -- the sort of unstructured writing that requires all parts of a work to be movable. It also does a damned good job at managing references and other media, as I can have a full PDF of an article, its citation information from Endnote, its abstract and my own personal notes on it, and on top of this, I can import full sound recordings of interviews that I have transferred into digital format, images that I plan on using but don't know where just yet, and everything else right in the document that I'm working on and all of them are ultimately usable in a productive way. Because of this, I have found it more agile in the beginning (and even middle) processes of writing scholarly articles than anything on the market. In addition, it has a split pane writing interface where you can work on two different parts of any fragment at once. This is one thing that no word processor (or even an outliner to some extent) has allowed me to do successfully, and one that I don't think they're really set up for - inevitably they force structured and linear writing on you, although to be honest, I've never used Melell's outlining features because I was one of those people who couldn't crack the interface to even get there in the first place. Scrivener takes about 15 minutes to learn and is as intuitive as NWP. Scrivener is not for final document creation, but what it does it does so well. Together, along with Endnote, they are my toolbox (along with Pages for syllabi and anything involving complex images, media, etc. and Keynote for stunning presentations and lectures, and Numbers for gradebooks and any low-level numerical analysis, which luckily as a qualitative researcher I rarely deal with).

None of these tools is a swiss army knife. They all do their things and they do them well and they all play their parts at specific times of the writing process - Scrivener when I want to make a mess, Nisus when I want to clean it up and get it into its final format. That was the hardest part of moving from Word for me, which does a lot of things and none of them are actually implemented in a meaningful and well-thought out way (2008 has only made this more clear). I had to learn a whole new, but ultimately smarter and more intuitive and much more productive, workflow, and ultimately it is my workflow and no one elses -- so your mileage, it should go without saying, may vary.

And if I get evangelical over Nisus sometimes, well...that's just puppy love.

Scott

[xiamenese]

I would say I'm as evangelical over Scrivener as Scott is over Nisus. I love Nisus too. As I've said on this or other threads, I did use Mellel for a long time and tried hard to convince myself that I liked and got on well with the interface, but the truth is I was never totally at ease in it. I also appreciate the fact that Mellel use their own text engine means that, in programming terms, some things can apparently be done more easily than when based on a souped-up version of the Apple text engine — floating text-boxes come to mind … On the other hand, that proprietary text engine means that it can't (couldn't?) import .docs written in Chinese, and that was the deal-breaker for me.

But I must admit, that often when I read a post like Timotheus' I think to myself, "But if you were doing the writing in Scrivener, moving that stuff around, doing whatever it is you're wanting to do, needing to have two documents open side by side ... it would be as easy as falling off a log." I think the biggest issue that I have read with Scrivener — though I will agree that it too won't suit everyone — is for academics in the humanities who need to use long footnotes as well as endnotes for bibliographic references.

But this is a Nisus forum and I am chary of going on about Scrivener here. The two work together beautifully — the same I believe is true of Scrivener and Mellel — and there is no way I'm giving up Nisus. It's just that Scrivener, to me, is a brilliant environment for doing the heavy lifting ... er ... writing, with Nisus providing the refinement, and Nisus for individual short writing tasks.

Mark

[Timotheus]

Hello Scott, Mark and others,

Yes, Scrivener is another of my crown jewels. I use it every day and I passionately love it. I perfectly remember the day I stumbled upon Scrivener Gold, which, as many will know, is the present Scrivener’s ancestor. It took me five minutes to see that it perfectly suited my needs. I started using it for the things for which until then I had used MacJournal, and since then working with Scrivener Gold and afterwards Scrivener is a very pleasant part of my everyday life.

It must be added, however, that I use Scrivener in an atypical way. I don’t use Scrivener for writing down things that sooner or later will be published or at least spread among other people. I use it almost exclusively as a repository for things which only my own eyes will see. No, I’m not talking about private diaries or similar things. I use Scrivener in the first place as a kind of ebook-environment. I have a whole range of Scrivener projects dedicated to various writers (I’m a man of letters). Each project contains the complete works of a writer (as far as they are digitized, of course), which I then read in Full Screen view, adding all kinds of loose observations of my own, some of which I might someday use in some way. And I have other projects about my financial things, about medical questions relating to my family, about my house, and so on. Works perfectly. Others might use Devonthink or another database program for this purpose. I own Devonthink too, and use it as an archive for all kinds of things (especially journal articles etc.) which are not exactly tied to a topic I’m working on. But Devonthink is a poor writing environment, so I don’t use it for writing.
I also use Scrivener for making translations. Its vertical split window feature makes it perfectly suited for this purpose.

It is often said that Scrivener is a perfect replacement for Mellel’s outline pane. That is true and not true at the same time. It depends on what exactly you are doing and writing, and on how exactly you are working. For long documents, I continue to prefer Mellel, for two reasons.

1. The first is the reason already hinted at by Mark. As far as working with footnotes is concerned, Scrivener has it limits; anyone who knows Scrivener will know what I’m talking about. That’s not the fault of the developer, Keith Blount, who is very gifted, very responsive, and very helpful. But the point is, that Scrivener is using Apple’s text engine; that’s why, as far as footnotes are concerned, the limits of Apple’s text engine are almost automatically the limits of Scrivener. And Apple's text engine is not good at working with footnotes. In other words: in this respect, the hands of the developer are more or less tied.
For this reason, those who use to write things with many, long and complex footnotes, in my view make a better choice with Mellel. For the others, Scrivener might indeed be a perfect alternative.

2. Many of my long documents in Mellel are readers etc. for students, which I correct, change and enlarge periodically. And it’s very difficult to go back from a wordprocessor like Mellel to an essentially different work environment like Scrivener. It causes various kinds of conversion issues anyone can imagine, and no one will be eager to experience. That’s another reason why I prefer to keep all my long documents in Mellel.

I also own the latest version of Pages, which I use especially for correcting (with track changes) the Word-documents my students send me. Works well!

And I own Indesign, but until now didn't find the time to learn working with it. Yes, I own far more word processors than I actually need, simply because I love them!

[mbywater]

I've come late to this discussion, but I'd side with those who say There Is No One True Way. I've just gone back to Mellel (2.5) after flirting with everything else on the market (as always). For me, the two clinchers are (1) the new cross-reference and bookmark functions in Mellel and (2) the principle -- alas, somewhat hidden by the developers, perhaps for fear of putting people off -- that the most important thing about a long document is its structure.

Of course we all knew this all along. But Word led us astray. We got excited. Look: italics! Look: Monotype Bembo 12/13.5 U/lc! Look!

Honestly, as we all know, it doesn't matter a damn. Everything I write apart from student handouts and the occasional letter is passed through other hands and applications, ending up quite out of my control with the appearance dictated by a house style book or a typographer. Pretty well everyone I know is in the same boat. (It may be different in academic science, though.) The truth is, I could submit everything in 12pt courier from title to endnotes and nobody would give a fig.

But fiddling with visual (rather than structural) appearance is seductive. When I started with Mellel, right back at v1, I came from Nisus Writer - probably the most powerful WP ever. I too went through Styles Hell ("Hellel"?) and, looking back, I was doing what 99% of us did: using styles to define appearance. It was, in retrospect, a silly but understandable mistake because since MacWrite I -- we, except the LaTeX crew -- the WYSIWYG paradigm was about appearance.

Some of you may remember Mike Glover/Icon Technology's MacAuthor. Brilliant, but terminally buggy; and you couldn't write a word until you'd defined a style. Yet even then we didn't get the point.

I only got the point myself recently, when I realised that (a) Mellel had refined Style Sets to the point where I had to get to grips with them and (b) working out what a Style Set actually required meant that I found myself thinking structurally. I'd say about 99% of my documents need a title, headings, sub-headings, footnotes/endnotes and bibliography. Add to that the occasional set-left paragraph and that's the lot. Indeed, about 90% of my stuff needs two styles: Heading and Body.

The truth is, it doesn't matter what they look like as long as they're distinguishable one from another, and, more importantly, navigable. By which I mean I want to be able to say "find me all the sub-headings and highlight them" or "take me to the next block quote".

In other words, I'm being forced to think structurally rather than visually; and with the flexibility of Mellel's "auto-title" system (which repays close attention) I find it remarkably helpful.

It's not all joy. Despite what some say about the Apple text system, I find NWP looks better than Mellel. I find the ability to style/layout stuff free-from in Nisus much more appealing sometimes than Mellel's corralling me into its (or mine; but they still feel like its) rigid styles system. But the difference comes when I think "oops". A document built in Mellel according to Mellel's paradigm has a sort of supple stability that nothing else approaches. I can't say I enjoy it as much as NWP; but I feel safer.

Someone once said of Oxford and Cambridge that they are more alike than any two universities in the world, so isn't it strange that they should play so hard at differences. The same applies to NWP and Mellel. Compare them with the competition, on either platform, and they are both out on their own. The question "which is better" is daft. I'd say I enjoy NWP more but rely more on Mellel for any structured document. Pages? A toy, I fear. Word? I just had to put a Word ms. into shape for someone and forgot the utter misery of working in that lurching dysfunctional behemoth. (Neither with NWP or Mellel does one ever find oneself yelling "For god's sake, what NOW?")

Scrivener and its more monastic big brother Ulysses are lovely too. Scrivener is writers' heaven for early drafts. But the more I find myself thinking in structural rather than visual terms, the less need I find I have for on-the-fly RTF-ing; Ulysses, with its unlimited tagging, or indeed Markdown (which plays well with Scrivener and Ulysses) seem increasingly attractive.

Apologies for this long post. Can't even think why I started it now. Probably because I am several months late with a big manuscript and can't even get straight down to procrastinating now...

[greenmorpher]

Hello mbywater

I’m with you on structure and that is what NWP delivers to me. I'm not familiar with Mellel but I structure my NWP documents using the styles. I have different sets of Paragraph Styles with my most commonly used two sets in my Nisus New File.dot with other sets of Paragraph Styles in different .dot documents which I access through the Document Manager.

In addition to structure, the Paragraph Styles incorporate character styling which is set up with heads and sub-heads in appropriate type for both screen display and print,while the body text styles are for type that works best on screen. I vary the appearance of the body text (and heads, if I feel like it) using Character Styles.

Paragraph Styles allow me to set the "Next Style" -- so for a head, I set the next style as a body text style. That may be a general body text or it may be a body text set up specifically for that head level, as in an outline.

The head Styles have levels in Contents incorporated in them so you can locate them and I have assigned keyboard shortcuts to them so I can call up a head whenever I want to insert one without lifting my hands from the keyboard.

As for selecting all heads of one level of finding indented quotes or whatever. These would be Paragraph Styles , NWP does this with the Format > Paragraph Style (or Chracter Style if you wish) > Select ... command.

Scrivener has particular uses but I don't see it as a competitor with NWP.

Actually thinking about this and writing this has introduced another thought for an NWP feature -- Styles in two levels so they can be set up as packages and the preferred style set activated.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes", the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, and "How to Start and Produce a magazine or Newsletter", now at the new low price of $29.95. See these books and more at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.

[Sascha Erni]

Hi mbywater,

I agree with your posting, which might not be too surprising considering I dabbled in LaTeX for a while (while still on Linux), worked as a content editor using (X)HTML, and bought Mellel pretty quickly after receiving my Mac. 2006, no Nisus Writer Pro as there is today … you get the idea.

For me, too, styles are mostly structural markers. I don’t particularly CARE what the document looks like, simply because it’s not important for my work. The structure is. I don’t often create camera-ready files, simply because I don’t have to – that’s the publishers’ job. The most I have to look after when formating a manuscript is, say, “everything in a serif font” or “standard manuscript format” or “this is what I want the cover letter to look like”. So, I have about four different style sets in my Mellel installation: fancy manuscript, plain manuscript, letters, default. With my Web background, bold and italics have always been additional “styles“ for me, rather than hard formating. Think <div class="emphasis"> rather than <b>.

And it’s much the same for me now that I mostly use Nisus.

As somebody who has worked with Mellel for some time, why did I also buy Nisus Writer Pro? Well, one word: RTF. Unfortunately, Mellel’s RTF export practically removes all my style markers, which makes it difficult to deal with the manuscript once an editor or cross-reader went over the text in WORD. All the nice things you mentioned in your posting are simply gone then – no navigation for chapter headings, for example. No STRUCTURE anymore. Then, Mellel’s RTF export doesn’t play nicely with WORD versions 2000 or older (which are still in use with quite a few people, apparently). All Umlauts are gone, for example. Also, at the time I was test-driving Nisus, the Beta for 1.1 was out, hence I was looking forward to a working comments implementation, too.

Collaboration. That’s the key word for me.

No doubt – if I were living on the proverbial island and working only for myself, producing all the printouts and whatnot with my bare hands (or for University or the like), I probably would have stuck with Mellel. But as is, I am not, hence Nisus came as a nice addition to my applications folder.

Cheers,
-Sascha

[mbywater]

I agree about the complete loss of all that good stuff once it gets into the hands of brutes wielding the Beast of Redmond. You're right; everything goes. And in one sense, that doesn't matter because by the time it gets to that stage, it's out of my hands. (I will NOT allow editing on live working files. Mellel's handy there, because the b***ers simply can't get at the file. They get a .pdf and mark it up how they will.

But it's a valid point -- I can see that in one sense, if you want to hang on to your control AFTER the Morlocks in the basement have begun despoiling it, then in some ways Nisus is better. It's a trade-off, isn't it? At the moment (because I am working on a structurally tricky book -- it shouldn't have been tricky but I screwed it up in first, second and third drafts -- and Mellel's Auto-Titles make reorganization much easier) I am in Mellel mode. I may return to Nisus mode for the next one. (Or I may just get a proper job; who know?)

It's true how much nicer the world would be if we could all use <div> tags etc. Maybe I'll return to Ulysses -- that would be fun. (Really. I love playing with different tools. Everyone else gets to do so: carpenters, surgeons, pilots etc; so why shouldn't writers?)

Now for an act of kindness. I shall save the distinguished J Diski from telling me off by forging a comment:

"Stop playing with software and finish your bloody book, Bywater. Yrs. affct., J Diski."

There. Quite indistinguishable from the real thing.

[jennydiski]

Bywater's super-ego is not the super hero I imagined I was going to be when I was little, but I'll settle for it.

Get on with the sodding book, Bywater.

jdxx

[mbywater]

Strange voice in my head there.. for a minute I thought... no. Never mind.