I don’t own Mircosoft Office for my Mac. With purchasing the hardware, and all the other little tools I needed to complete the switch, Office on top was just not possible. Besides, I still have a perfectly good Windows box running Office that I can use for book edits and so on.
Yesterday, I needed to author a document and I wanted to do it on my mac, dammit. Up until then it hadn’t occurred to me that word processors other than Word might actually exist (!), so I googled. And I found Mellel.
Mellel is truly a beautiful piece of work. The interface oozes charm and style, without sacrificing a drop of functionality. It does, however, require a shift in thinking as you simply can’t approach Mellel in the same way you do Word. The reason for this is that Mellel presumes you actually have a task to achieve. It presumes you want to produce a paper, book or other document in an attractive and consistent way and with the least fuss possible. It assumes you’re in the for the long-haul.
Mellel offers four levels of styling. At the top, there’s page styling. These are your basic page layouts with margins, headers and footers and so on. Word offers templates too, but Mellel’s appear to be useful. The next level of styling is paragraph styling. This defines your block-level elements like headings, copy and footnotes, and specifically the spacing and indenting they use. Each paragraph style is associated with a character style. This is the third level. Character styles control the typeface, weight and size of text.
The final level of styling is variations. Each character style can have eight variations on that style. This could be anything from as simple as italics or different weights, through to variations for code samples, hyperlinks, lists, you name it. Anywhere where the context of the text is the same, but the visual representation needs to be varied.
So basically, you set these styles up how you want them, and then you’re ready to go. Everything has a keyboard shortcut (customizable too) so you don’t have to take your hands off the keyboard when authoring. Once you’re set up, all you need to worry about is creating your content. Mellel basically fixes everything I hate about Word. It’s amazingly cheap and in active development. Beat that.
On a completely different note, welcome to the world Neve Pitman! Congrats to Nathan, and especially to Jo for creating such a cute little life. I’ve scheduled Neve in to start on some light XHTML work from April 15th, okay?
Comments
I use FrameMaker on a daily basis and recently Adobe have announced no further development for the Apple platform, they have also aroused a lot of doubt about their commitment to the product in any form.
Melle*l* looks as if it may develop into the solution I need.
More information can be found here:
http://www.openoffice.org/