Mellel - 2.5

Mellel is top-notch software: fast, clean, virtually no crashes, very few bugs, and very well tied into Apple's OS X technologies. very pleasant to write in. It is also well documented, with both formal and informal user-provided materials available. For scholars, the combination of Mellel and Bookends is terrific (5 stars)--a pleasure to work with, significantly more so than Word or the Word/EndNotes combination.

Comparisons are difficult and reflect personal considerations. On the pro side, I would emphasize:


• Great integration with the bibliographic program Bookends
• Very flexible and bug-free "footnoting" (e.g., you can have footnotes, endnotes and temporary author notes)
• Easy and powerful cross-referencing (e.g., refer to a figure in text and have the figure number change automatically as figures are added or deleted)
• A well integrated and interactive outline system
• Autonumbering of sections, figures, tables, etc.
• Excellent service (and a users' forum)
• Very low price (the package with Bookends included is a steal)
• Not Microsoft (important for those of us who believe in competition and deplore the way that Microsoft treats Office as a cash cow to be slowly and sloppily fixed and updated only as absolutely necessary)
[• Multi-language features, including right-to-left languages. I don't use any of this, but it's very important for others]

On the cons side:
• Mellel doesn't yet have a track-changes feature, which is valuable in collaboration--especially with shared authorship rather than with others merely commenting on "your" piece
• Inside a corporate environment, it's always a bit easier to go with the herd
• Actually using Mellell's many nice but deeper features requires some unlearning and learning, which in some cases can take some time [the good service and forum help, however]
• For better or worse, Word will probably be around in 2030, whereas Mellel is the product of a small company that could at some point cease further development [you could readily export your files to another program if need be, however]


On the cons-that-don't-really-count-for-much side:
• Import/export to Word are not quite perfect and never will be (but the number of glitches is quite small, so adjusting for them is no big deal during the draft stage)
• Mellel has no built-in drawing features (but Word's aren't very good and I strongly prefer to use a "real" drawing program anyway, in my case OmniGraffle)
• Mellel is not part of an integrated suite, as is Office's Word and, to some extent, as is Pages within iWork. Personally, I don't see that as a measurable loss despite its superficial attractions.

If you're even considering Mellel, then you're probably interested in something other than Word. If so, Pages would be the most obvious competitor. It's a very nice program, but not yet as powerful and pleasant as Mellel for scholarly work.

Mellel is not perfect: it has flaws and shortcomings, it still lacks some rather essential features, and existing features are not always perfectly implemented. And it certainly isn't the most user friendly of wordprocessors.

And yet, especially for writing long and complex documents, Mellel is absolutely invaluable: truly a class of its own. Solid as a rock, superb outlining, excellent crossreferences, very fast and very pleasant to use even with documents counting many hundreds of pages with thousands of footnotes. I have been working now with Mellel for over four years, and could not imagine my academic writing without it.

Besides Mellel, I own many other wordprocessors. I use them regularly for less demanding writing tasks, and like quite a lot of them. But if some cruel tyrant forced me to give up all my wordprocessors except one, that one would undoubtedly be Mellel.