If you're writing a novel, a long paper, a technical document or a guide you probably require your word processor to be stable, reliable, flexible, easy to work with, and of course to have the features you need.
With the first two, your choice is clear. Mellel is the most stable and reliable word processor on the market today, for either Mac OS X or any other platform. We're not bragging, just stating the facts: Mellel is so stable and reliable because we work very hard to make it so.
Mellel is also very flexible and easy to work with. If you're accustomed to working with MS Word or one of its clones, you may find Mellel a bit difficult to figure at first. Mellel improved on MS Word and co. and by that also changed the way some things are done. The adjustment period will be short, we can assure you. It doesn't take long to adjust to a better method of working.
Lastly, Mellel offers many of the feature which make long document writing both possible and easy. In fact, this is exactly where Mellel excels.
The first thing you want your word processor to do is work. No unexpected surprises, glitches, bugs or hiccups are welcome. Mellel is near-perfect in that respect. It just works.
- It just works: Mellel is programmed from the bottom up to work well under duress
- It's tested: We don't play games with software, we test it. Instead of "public beta" we run real beta testing with a 400+ strong beta testing group
- Double-insurance: You'll probably never need it or know it exists, but Mellel offers two layers of backup: auto-save and auto-backup
Mellel offers several powerful tools to organise and format your documents. Those tools allow you to maintain consistency within a document, between multiple documents and, just as important, change the formatting and reorganise the document quickly and easily. Among the tools offered by Mellel are:
- Styles: Mellel offers you the option to use columns, page/chapter, paragraph, and character styles, and in addition styles to control the appearance of lists, notes, and auto-titles
- Auto-titles: Design, format style and re-style headings, running headers, ToC and captions in your document
- Style sets: This unique feature allows you to create and maintain sets of styles you can use with templates and documents, and easily change styles for every document that uses the style set
- Templates: If style sets are not for you, templates will work just as well for you
Mellel's unique outline tool allows you to easily view, navigate and edit your document. The outline pane displays a 'skeleton' outline of all the chapters, headings, tables, figures, etc. in your document alongside the document content, allowing you to edit the content and the structure of your document at the same time. Some of the more interesting options here are:
- Auto-outline: The outline is automatically created as you go along whenever you add an auto-title to the document
- Separate or combined view for structure and special tags: You can view the document structure with special tags (such as figure or table captions) or display those separately
- Easy editing: Promote, demote, move, copy or delete any outline item easily.
- Different display: You can have the outline contain different information than the heading in the document (e.g., show titles in the outline, but just numbering in the document)
Mellel's outline tool is powerful tool for long document editing and navigation. In the near future, we intend to further enhance some options to make it a better tool for traditional outlining tasks as well.
Mellel offers several layout options you can only find in some high-end page-layout applications. Some of those are:
- Keep with Next: Keep with the next x lines of the next paragraph
- Keep lines together: Keep lines at the start or end of a paragraph or keep the whole paragraph together
- Advanced hyphenation: with control over language, hyphenation limit, hyphenation zone, word length, and so on
- Columns: unlimited number of columns, balancing, space above, gutter width, line type, weight, colour, space above and below, background, and more
- Auto-title: Total control over all formatting and styling elements in titles
Mellel is open to the world, both internally and externally. It supports standards, supports them openly, and handles the support itself, so and required adjustment can be easily made.
- XML: Mellel's native format is based on the XML standard (from v. 2.1). It's open, documented and free, so anyone can use and convert it
- RTF and .doc: MS Word compatibility is a necessity. With our extensive RTF support we try to make it as painless as possible
- Unicode: Mellel is fully unicode compliant, but also supports several older encoding formats some of you may still be using.
- Plain Text: Mellel's XML format ensures that all documents will be accessible also as plain text files, freeing you from any fear of being ties to a propriety format
- OpenType: Mellel supports the OpenType font standard, allowing you better multilingual support and compatibility with Windows
Mellel is written to work with long documents: It opens long documents fast, displays them accurately and, most importantly, keeps working fast.
- No Limit: Mellel will work perfectly even with extremely long files (1,000 pages or more). No quirks, no "missing footnotes," no problem
- No reformatting: Mellel formats your document before displaying it, so scrolling and paging up and down always stays smooth, without any on-the-fly reformatting
- No Delay: Ever added a footnote or a new line on page 220 out of 450 in MS Word? Well, the 3 seconds wait for the new line to appear isn't something you have to learn to live with...
Mellel was designed to allow you to work efficiently, by offering you a simple, consistent interface, with all the options you need close at hand.
- One click interface: Every feature is one click or one menu selection away
- All Look the Same: Consistent GUI design allows you to use the same simple principle with every feature
- Designed for work: Windows, colour scheme, and icon design designed to reduce eye strain and allow you to work longer and more efficiently
Whether you're writing a term paper or a scholarly book, footnotes and endnotes are usually a basic ingredient in your work. Mellel offers a feature rich, dependable footnoting system, that is significantly more powerful than that offered by any other word processor for Mac OS X.
- Total control: Control all aspects of your notes, from separator to positioning, style and formatting, etc.
- Multiple note streams: Use several note flows simultaneously (e.g., footnotes, endnotes, translator notes, comments, etc.)
- Note Styles: Shortcuts to ease applying complex layout, positioning and formatting attributes
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