About Mellel 1.8, Mellel survey, some great reviews and even greater tips, shameless marketing ploys, OpenType vs. TrueType and two Biblical tips
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
Mellel Tips:
Mellel News
Mellel 1.8 is coming -- And it's going to be big. Big, I've said? Huge! We're not at liberty to tell you everything yet, but what we can tell you will be impressive enough, I think. Just take a look at the following:
- Outline: This new feature will include a window pane displaying the structure of the document, allowing you to edit the structure, move chapters around, and jump to any place in the document. The outline pane will allow you to create an outline of the document from scratch, similar to the way this is done with dedicated outline applications, and to edit the outline (structure) of an existing document, change the order of chapters, promote or demote items, and so on.
- OpenType support: Mellel 1.8 will implement support for the OpenType technology developed by Adobe and Microsoft. This support is mostly a behind-the-scenes addition to Mellel's font handling capabilities, but will have far-reaching implications on its typographic and multilingual capabilities. Some of the new options that this support will avail are listed below:
- Improved typography: Mellel will utilise OpenType to implement support for options like old-style figures, small caps, fractions, special ligatures, and more.
- More languages: Several languages and scripts that are not supported at all on Mac OS X will be supported by Mellel via its OpenType support. A typical example is Syriac, currently without any support on Mac OS X, which will be fully supported with Mellel 1.8.
- Better support for languages: Through OpenType Mellel will be able to provide much better support, for example, for languages based on Devanagari, offer additional support for Arabic ligatures and bring Hebrew support to perfection with support for pointing and trope positioning.
- Improved typography: The details here are a bit sketchy on purpose, but we intent add several major improvements to Mellel's typographic abilities in areas like kerning and tracking, stylistic changes (no more "squares"...), and much more.
Mellel Survey -- Want to help us improve Mellel? By filling-in our survey (this will take no more than a couple of minutes) you can. The survey is completely anonymous and the questions are a little less boring than is usual with such surveys (we hope...).
We're great once more! -- after a short recess, the good reviews started pouring in again. Fran Iglesias from Macintec re-reviewed Mellel, concluding: "Mellel is my preferred word processor. It is the first word processor I've tested that invites me to write and facilitates me doing my work." Robert Pritchett from MacCompanion reached a similar conclusion, giving Mellel a perfect score of 5 out of 5.
Tipping in -- The Mellel Guide a bit too long for your liking? Couldn't find what you wanted in the guide? A new page on our site, containing mini-guides and tips may be just the thing for you. The page currently contain 9 guides and tips, but many more will be added to it during the following months.
Also, those of you visiting our site might find some pretty useful things on our fonts and keyboard layouts pages.
The SOHO/Family Pack -- As some of you may remember, RedleX now offers a special purchase option allowing you to buy five copies of Mellel for just $49.
The offer is a huge hit for us, but even more so for you. The SOHO/Family Pack makes for a 80 per cent discount(!) compared with buying a group of 5 licenses. Add to that the fact that Mellel costs less than half the price of any other word processor on the market, and you can understand why it is such a hit.
Oh, well, after such an onslaught of [insert appropriate derogatory adjective here] marketing we both need to spend some time elsewhere. Which is a good idea, since the What's going on section is coming right up.
What's Going On
OpenType or AAT, that is the question -- Those of you who are familiar with fonts and font technology may be a bit puzzled by our announcement about the forthcoming support in Mellel for OpenType (see above). What has a pure-bred Mac OS X cocoa application to do with a font technology used almost exclusively by Windows application? The answer, sadly, is: quite a lot.
OpenType is a font technology developed by Microsoft offering advanced typography and extensive language support. The technology allows adding special instruction tables to a TrueType or a PostScript font. Those fonts, used with an application that knows how to handle them, offer elaborate typographical control and support for writing in various languages.
Microsoft originally developed the technology as part revenge and part necessity. In the mid 90s, after Apple released QuickDraw GX, Microsoft approached it with a request to license the TrueType GX portion of the technology. Apple refused and went on to develop AAT -- the technology formerly known as TrueType GX -- which is now integrated into Mac OS X. Microsoft went its own way and developed TrueType Open. When Adobe (and PostScript) joined the ranks, the technology gained the name OpenType.
As can be expected in view of this brief history of the two technologies, AAT and OpenType are quite similar with regards to the options they offer. Both are also similar in the system level support they get (in Mac OS X and Windows). Unfortunately, a third similarity can be discerned in the glacial pace in which both technologies are developed. Apple and Microsoft's sites seem to be firmly planted with both feet in the mid-90s with respect to font technology.
The main difference between AAT and OpenType seem to be in the way their respective developers treat the issue of languages. Microsoft have built OpenType from the beginning as a means to address various language issues. Apple, all the while, seemed quite content not to bother with all those strange people and their funny languages.
With the advent of Mac OS X users started to taste the bitter fruits of Apple's approach. The Mac -- once the bastion of multilinguality -- stopped supporting many of the world languages and Apple did very little, if at all, to regain its multilingual abilities of old. On the Windows side of the fence, meanwhile, people around the world started to become aware of the advantages OpenType offers them. The support for the technology was spread fairly thin (i.e., only Microsoft and Adobe seemed to support the technology), but that seemed to be enough to give Windows and OpenType the edge when it comes to multilinguality.
This change in the multilingual weather did not escape the eyes of font developers. More and more of them, especially those interested in right-to-left languages and other complex scripts began to despair of Apple ever supporting their languages and began developing exclusively in OpenType. This led to a situation where languages such as Assyrian (Syriac) is currently completely unsupported on the Mac, and Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and similar scripts are only partially supported, especially when it comes to advanced typographical options. At the same time, Windows and OpenType offers full support for all those languages and scripts.
It is still possible that Apple will at some time in the future support those languages and scripts. In the meantime, for a growing number of scholars and users of right-to-left languages, it is Windows or bust... Or Mellel with OpenType support.
Mellel Tips
Accordance 6.2 -- Accordance is a Bible software that gives you access to a comprehensive library of Bibles, commentaries and other tools. Accordance is considered by many (including myself, after seeing it in action) to be the best Bible research tool. If that wasn't enough, it is a Mac only software, which enables you to enjoy using it and at the same time make your Windows-capped friends drool with envy. As the best-of-breed tool in its field Accordance doesn't come cheap. The basic package ("Starter Collection") costs only 39 USD, but for serious work you'd probably want to add other packages or parts of packages, which may amount to quite a sum.
The reason I mention Accordance now (besides it being a wonderful tool) is a major change in the way it works, as far as Mellel is concerned. Starting with version 6.2 (the update is available from Accordance's site) Accordance supports exporting text as Unicode. This new option will allow you now to drag and drop text or copy and past text in Greek, Hebrew, etc. directly from Accordance into Mellel, with word-order, pointing, trope marks, etc. kept intact.
Mac Sword updated -- The little application that could got updated. Mac Sword, a Bible software offering access to more than 150 versions of the Bible and other religious scriptures, was updated with "many improvements over previous versions." There are also a few new additions to the modules. There seem to be a mention of an addition to the software called "Bible Times" that is supposed to allow you to search and compare the various Bibles. A wonderful idea, but since I could not figure out how to install it, I could not test it (nor recommend it). The address below may be useful in more capable, terminal-learned hands.
