What I Say

We keep hearing how nobody can compete with Microsoft without reinventing how word processing is being done. I think RedleX has been going down that path for some time now. Think locally, act globally. Everything from Arabic to Uyghur. Robust, rich, stylish yet minimalistic.

The last time we reviewed this app, it cost $20 less. But it has a whole lot more in it now. I’ve been dinking around with the latest beta versions and the changes are constant, so Ori Redler and his team are busy making this app better all the time and the betas keep coming! I can’t seem to keep up. It isn’t just evolving, it is morphing. And that is a good thing. They gave this originally wimpy word processor steroids because they have been listening to their worldwide clientele without making the app go too deeply into feature-creep.

You can look at the lengthy comparisons between it and other Word processing apps here – http://www.redlers.com/mellelcompetitive.html They run page after page of comparisons against NeoOffice/OpenOffice, Nisus Writer Express and MS Word. Rather telling are the tables on launching behaviours, resource hogging, interface standards, language support, various style types, image handling, outlining, cross-referencing (bad grades for Mellel), Indexing (“No” in every row for Mellel), Line numbering (again “No” in every row for Mellel), Scripting (not supported either) or Tracking changes (not supported). They know they have a few areas to improve on if they want to “compete” directly with either MS Word, NeoOffice or NisusWriter, otherwise they would not have run those comparisons, because the other apps get better grades than they do in those areas.

How many languages are supported in Mellel? Over 30 - http://www.redlers.com/mellellanguages.html And you can see they support many, if not all of the non-Romance fonts such as Arabic, Cyrillic, Dari, Greek, Hebrew, Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Syriac, new Turkish (Roman), Urdu, Uzbek, old (Ottoman) languages with 'Open Type' and 'Apple Advanced Typography' technology support. They also support what they call “CKJ languages” or Chinese, Korean and Japanese, but not vertically yet.

They also have called out for help with localizations, with many done, but others needing localization - http://www.redlers.com/mellellocalisation.html

The latest beta Mellel Guide is 306 pages in length. Yes, it is that big. And it was updated recently from being 333 pages long (version 2.1).

I really love this line, “You should not fear loosing your formatting when saving .doc files as RTF, because .doc is virtually identical to RTF”. The way to import and export MS Word is via the mid-step of RTFing the documents.

Mellel is multilingual Unicode-based word processor built for Mac OS X and is pronounced with the accent on the last syllable (mell-EL) and means TextMill, TextWorks, WordMill, Wordsmithy or WordWorks in Hebrew (I took Hebrew in college and had to bail, because it was too much for my brain to grasp). What sets Mellel apart for me is that it seems to have been developed with the intent of focusing on areas that are weak in other word processing packages.

There are both Hyphenation and Compiled Dictionaries that support Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latviesu, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, UK English, Ukrainian and US English using the Mellel Hyphenation Lab - http://www.redlers.com/downloadhyphenation.html

And there is more. There are supported keyboard layouts for Arabic-Uyghur, Etruscan, Hebrew, Romanian and Persian layouts - http://www.redlers.com/downloadkeyboard.html

There is even a growing list of templates available - http://www.redlers.com/downloadtemplate.html

Special attention has been given to how Notes are created. Notes (such as Footnotes, Endnotes, etc.) are also dealt with in style using a "streaming" mentality. Every note is part of a stream – like music. These handle Translator's notes, Commentator's notes, Out-of-Sequences notes and again, these too are treated as "styles".

Lists are also treated as another style. And they too are rich with options.

Auto-Numbering is discussed. That is where elements can be automatically numbered, whether they are tables, images, figures or other objects. We segue our way from "streams" to "flows" with auto-numbering and these can be used to establish a hierarchy for a Table of Contents. There are also "Mentions" which are basically anchors that can be used inside headers or footers to dynamically references parts of documents.

Tables can be created and placed just about anywhere including headers, footers, footnotes and/or endnotes. The drop-down menu for Tables is almost too simplistic, but it hides a wealth of capabilities behind it and almost anticipates what you want to do with table setups. It gets pretty sophisticated pretty fast and even gets into such detail as cell-padding (distance between content and the border of each cell).

If you do any kind of research articles, more than likely you refer to Bibliographies and References as part of the document, right? RedleX has cooperated with SonnySoftware http://www.sonnysoftware.com/ to include Bookends automagically handles reference formatting of citations on-the-fly. They also work with Third Street Software’s Sente - http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/   This is done through a Bibliography palette. The Import/Export section deals with handling issues related to MS Wor and Excel, and other Word Processor esoterica including how to send and receive graphics.

Are you starting to get the feel for how powerful Mellel really is?

Try Variables for instance. Variables are strings of text data that are used over and over, such as names, addresses, letterhead, etc. and are modified using a Document Info Sheet.

Mellel is bidirectional (right/left, left/right) and also uses Kashida justification (how Arabic and Persian characters line up) via the Character Appearance palette. For Hebrew, Niqud (Hebrew vowel markings and sounds nick-OOOD) is also fully supported (and if you didn't know, is also right/left).

Redlex treats special characters in such a way that they can be found quickly. They will need to work on the list, because it is not in alphabetical order (maybe in Hebrew, who knows), but the list starts with Currency, then Mathematical, Quotation, Accents, Hyphen & Dash, Space, Arabic, Hebrew and Other.

There are tutorials on styles, stationary, creating documents, using Auto-Numbering and numbering flows, working and designing lists, creating a mixed list, and starting to write in Arabic, Cyrillic, Persian and Hebrew.

In the back of the manual, there is a long list of features and bug fixes since Version 1.2 up through version 2.1.

For $50 USD, this is quite a robust, powerful, word processor that focuses on those areas most used by multilingual Word-Smiths. You really can't go wrong, since RedleX has given us the try-before-you-buy ability as part of downloading the program.

The app also includes tagging and XML coding. What isn’t intuitively obvious is hyperlinking. For some reason, that has not been integrated yet and is what I use most. Hyperlinks become live, once files are exported to HTML or to PDF though.

Try Mellel now so you get used to this Word Processor. Maybe Ori Redler and his team will work on a universal translator option.

Digging Deeper

Unicode Resources - http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors_macosx.html

Wikepedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellel