Thank you for the detailed exploration of Mellel. For my use, the advantages it offers are better typography and better management of titles/variables/internal references.
As far as I can see, a better management of variables is not true. And what ‘variables’ are you talking about? Page Variables? Or Document Variables?
In Nisus, you easily insert ‘variables’ from the Insert menu > Document Property, and you can insert as many as you like, whereas Mellel allows you to insert only 20. So I don’t understand your statement.
Last edited by Þorvarður on 2024-09-07 21:33:08, edited 2 times in total.
I don't care much what the vendors define as variables. There are three kinds in my world:
what the program manages with built-in code. Mellel's auto titles do a good job here. I believe they are inspired by FrameMaker. No one does the one I have need for constantly: let me refer to a footnote number. as in "while footnote 47 notes Peirce's ..." But in the good old days I could wrote a book that referred to itself and its structure better than we can now.
what the user can define. Neither does a good job here. The number you can define is irrelevant. I'd like to specify an executive summary through my document as ledes in certain paragraphs and/or invisibly highlighted text and have them serialised where each has a value of the text of the next.
what we can insert and be calculated or evaluated by the code supplemented by macros. This is where tinderbox has a massive advantage as any variable (they call them attributes) has presence in a robust macro language, and separately in a similarly robust export/publication language. The user can define any number across all the common types. Unless I am missing something, Nisus has only one part of this in a relatively more limited macro language that can access real programs, but no way for the document to 'call' a macro.
It only takes a few minutes for you to start thinking about how this can be used. The chapter I am writing now makes passing reference to a discussion group where a very advanced topic is being discussed and has been for years. It would be great for me to define an area that says "nLab has discussed (blah) for 6 years now with (blah) different perspectives characterised by (blah), and most recently the concept of (blah) was introduced by (blah)(reference)"
Or if you want to stick with plain old valuables: Figure 3 shows a bar chart of known and presumed paid Russian operatives in the Trump campaign as of (November 2016, November 2020, and <<today>>) (notes on source and methodology, also computed).
So, I think auto title management by itself is enough to attract some folks to Mellel from Nisus. I also might use the OT extensions. But it is not compelling enough to toss the other advantages of Nisus.
User since 1990
Most current NWp and MacOS
MacBookPro 16-inch 2023
With the recent update to Mellel 6.3, and the lack of movement on these Nisus forums, I have been trying to get myself more up to speed with Mellel as a back-up. Apart from the general, in my view, idiosyncratic UI which requires a lot of back-and-forth in setting anything up, what I have found is:
Tab setting I find very difficult; adding a new tab is OK, but removing one I find next to impossible, and moving one is challenging… it's all so much easier in NWP.
Unlike in NWP, if you have a hanging indent, you cannot have a tab character to the left of the margin marker; case in point, ingredients list in my recipe collection… in NWP I have a 2-inch hanging indent, with a right tab at 1.75 inches, so an ingredients line has a TAB followed by the quantity, a TAB, then the ingredient name, which wraps to the 2" margin, which cannot be done in Mellel.
I find setting up footnotes in NWP is far more transparent than in Mellel, where you have at least two different dialogs to negotiate and the "preview area" in "Configure Notes" doesn't reflect the "Note Text" Paragraph Style setting.
For my workflow it has a major deal-breaker… while it can import RTF documents compiled from Scrivener and displays them as is, unlike NWP it doesn't pick up on the styles, so I would have to go through the whole document paragraph by paragraph, heading by heading, applying the styles in Mellel which are already there in the RTF. Compiling to DOCX and opening that in Mellel does retain the styles as created by Scrivener, but doesn't apply the equivalent styles from the Mellel default template; in comparison, compiling to RTF, opening in NWP and using a macro to update the styles with a given style collection is as simple as falling off a log!
So, while I like Mellel and will keep it updated, it seems to me that it is best suited if the whole writing process is done with it rather than using it as part of a workflow with other writing tools; presumably this is an outcome of its using its own file format. Visually, Mellel is more attractive and slightly more approachable than LibreOffice, which I find bloated and overly complex, but which I know to have better RTF handling. Pages is like Mellel in its handling of RTF and DOCX.
