True, at the end it is the same. But conflict palette have a disadvantage. If you add another action/string to the same trigger, the letter that triggers the string in the palette may change. If you like to use palettes, have you ever considered using a “normal” palette? There you can assign the trigger yourself, “e” or “x” or whatever you want and it stays fixed. Below, for example, a palette that I use. The triggers “T”, “2”, “N” … are freely chosen
Mellel is the word processor Bookends works best with. I don’t know if they still sell both bundled but they used to.
The only problem is that Mellel does not work good with the rest of the writing world. Which is a total shame, as it would be the perfect word processor for academics and other long form writers.
Yes, they still do Mellel - Mellel + Bookends: The Perfect Combo
How is that? Why don’t they play well with others?
Try to get a text into Mellel without loosing neither the formatting like italics nor the structure of the text i. e. headings with their specific levels.
In Mellel a structure level is, unlike in other word processors like Word or LibreOffice/Open Office, not part of the paragraph style. Which method is the better is not important on the practical side of things. The consequence for the user is: They have to manually assign structure elements to the headings after importing to Mellel. A program, specifically designed for texts with hundreds and hundreds of pages and hundreds and hundreds of footnotes. That might mean a lot of assignings of structure elements. Times every draft.
As far as I can tell—I’m rarely using graphics and tables in my documents, so this is about text only—Mellel’s for print/PDF output is the finest everybody can get who wants to avoid the learning curves of LaTeX (or InDesign, Affinity Designer, &c.).
In my opinion Scrivener and Mellel would make the perfect combo for academics, especially with Bookends in as the third musketeer. But the two brothers—nowadays only one as the other sadly has passed away—behind Mellel never cared about a good import (and export) function. Or about laying open the specifics of Mellel’s text format so we could at least pester poor Keith to come up with a nifty new compile format.
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I agree with Suavito. When OS-X first came out, somewhere around 2001/2, I needed to find a word processor as TextEdit was too limited, and the best one on the block at the beginning was Mellel. But at that time it had one big problem … it couldn’t import .DOCs in Chinese, so I had to run them through TextEdit to convert them to RTF and import that.
A little while later, a precursor to Nisus Writer became available which, being based on the Apple text engine could import them directly, so I started using that. As soon as Nisus Writer appeared, I moved over to that and have used it — for many years in the Pro version — ever since. I still keep Mellel installed and updated and want to love it, but it puts me through too many hoops.
As someone who used PageMaker for years, then InDesign until it was priced out of my range, I am more at home with Affinity Publisher than I am with Mellel.
NWP has the great advantage that it’s native format is RTF, so it works superbly with Scrivener. While the integration of NWP with Bookends is not quite as close as Mellel+Bookends, you can scan and unscan the RTF document from within NWP which suits me. For me, the other winning features of NWP are its very powerful Search and Replace system and it’s macro language—with a very helpful community of experts in that—and the ability to turn a complex RegEx search and replace expression into a macro with one click.
Mark
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That is enough to turn anyone off. You would have to have a very good reason to use a program that made you go through so many hoops.
Same here. I switched to the Mac at the end of 2006 and Word was an unstable joke and OpenOffice only ran in an X-something environment. Mellel was the first decent word processor I discovered on the otherwise great Mac platform. And it came even bundled with Bookends, a software of a kind for some reason I had never heard of before. One that would have helped me a lot with my thesis a year before.
And in 2007 I made another surprising discovery—that I hadn’t been looking for a word processor at all and that my search had come to an end. Which was the beginning of a so much better way of writing and came by the name of … well, you got it.
Out of sympathy for the developers and at least a tiny bit of hope that one day there might be a smooth way to import I have kept Mellel.
To not stick to reminiscing alone I’d like to add that the latest mobile version of Paste has introduced a keyboard. The now deceased clipboard manager Copied had one too and it’s a game changer. Adding content by keyboard—for example from a pinboard holding Bookends references—works even on an iPhone so much faster than switching between apps.
Yesterday, there was an update to Mellel, so once again I had a play opening a recipe in RTF. No styles came across, of course. But I couldn’t work out how to create a hanging indent with a right tab 18px before the margin. In NWP, it’s very easy … like falling off a log.
So yet again, too many hoops. And the other killer-feature of NWP, which I forgot to mention, is its internal multi-character shortcut system.
Mark
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Do you use Affinity Publisher with Nisus Writer Pro? So, you do your writing nowadays on NWP?
Basically, I use Scrivener compiling to RTF and compile to NWP, in which I have a macro that imports the style sheet I want and makes various other assignments. I also have publisher which I will probably use as the last stage to sort out any intricacies of page layout for some projects.
Mark
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Interesting workflow, thanks! I’m currently learning about mellel and NWP.
If you want to explore an NWP workflow, I can send you the basic macro for importing and applying a style sheet and the other tweaks that are necessary.
Mark
I’m not really tech-savvy, so I would have to explore further what is a macro and how to make one, but yeas I would appreciate if you send it.
Aside from my “academic” life, I have a business that I recently started, and I’m considering publishing some content to my clients, like small documents related to their pet’s health (I’m a vet). I think I’ll definitely explore publisher to make some great-looking documents along with Nisus.
Just speaking for myself, all the above sounds to me pretty complicated. I wrote my dissertation in Scrivener; just wrote plain text and then pasted it to Latex (which is not as difficult to learn as it seems). (Now I do things differently, with styles, so that I can export either to latex or markdown or doc, but back then 10+ years ago there were no styles or at least I didn’t know how to use them.) I had a separate latex doc for every chapter, which I then pieced together in a “master” latex doc via a package called ‘subfiles’. It was super easy; took me probably a day or two to set everything up (your school may even have a latex template that would make this step quicker; ours didn’t), but there was absolutely no fuss about it afterwards. And of course in the Scrivener project I just arranged things however it was the most convenient. I’m not in a very code-heavy field, so the plaintext latex didn’t interfere much (yes, there were footnotes and emphasis and block quotes and citations, but that’s pretty much it).
I use BibDesk for bibliography management, which I can very strongly recommend if you’re on a Mac (10+ years later, I’m still using the same bibtex database that I started then, so now it’s quite big). Whenever I try something just to shake things up a bit, I keep returning to bibdesk for its convenience and simplicity.
Anyway, everyone does these things differently, and once you have a good system in place that you like, you should just hold on to it. Just wanted to share my experience.
Today is busy, but I’ll send you the NWP macro and a basic stylesheet and project that you can try with.
It might help to know if you’re in the humanities or sciences, if you will need figures/images with captions or formulae, as those make things a bit more complicated.
In reply to @atiz, while I continue to experiment, even after 20 years of using NW(P) with 15 years of using it with Scrivener — for instance I am now working on a set-up where I compile to .md, set to open in NWP with a macro that converts it to RTF applying a style-sheet on the way as by that route I can use binder hierarchy setting heading levels automatically and don’t have to assign specific section layouts; but I still have to work out details about lists and list styles, and footnotes/endnotes — for most purposes, I compile to RTF which opens automatically in NWP. I run the macro from a shortcut; it asks me which of my stylesheets I want to apply — 1 mouse click — it then applies the style sheet, marks all the Chinese text linguistically. I then have to remove the “Normal” style which Scrivener applies to footnotes — move cursor to a footnote, Cmd-A, Cmd-A, right mouse button in palette, click “Remove selected style” — and that’s it. If there are bibliographic references, a single shortcut opens Bookends, which scans the document converting the temporary citations and creating the bibliography all to whatever format is wanted.
That is not complicated. The work has gone into creating the macro, just as for you, the work went into setting up your latex workflow. Once it’s set up, things are straightforward after that. So, which route @jvet wants to take is up to them.
Mark
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I pretty much prefer a workflow that doesn’t deal with Latex, I only use MathJax in case I’m working with Markdown. I once tried Latex and got into many issues and decided it is not for me, or at least not in my reduced and already busy timeframe, although it is a great tool (I even bought TexPad).
Furthermore, I do work in the sciences and will need figures with captions and sometimes formulae.