Existing users, 
I’m still waiting for a version able to sort text lists in alphabetical order before I can make the purchase and begin using Mellel full-time.
My old standby Tex-Edit Plus doesn’t sort Hebrew (and thus also Arabic) correctly, so I can’t use it for compiling and thinning out vocabulary lists as part of my Biblical Hebrew study, but Mellel doesn’t even have that function at all, so it is still of no real use to me.
Microsoft Word did amazingly order my Hebrew vocabulary lists correctly, but it took a lot of effort to get Word to display text in the right encoding after copying from application to application and trying Apple TextEdit’s text encoding capabilities. I have to use Word for my daily work with Japanese and Chinese, anyway, but look forward to switching to Mellel if enough features become available.
Mellel
Advanced word processor designed especially for scholars, creative, technical writers.
Version: 2.7.2
Still no order/sorting capability, so no purchase yet
Feedback Type: Commentary
Contributed by: Xiaopangzi Wednesday, August 30 2006 @ 05:34 PM PDT
Product Platform: MacOSX
Used Product For: Less than a month
Recommend Product: YES
Comments
Suggestion... - Xiaopangzi
Thank you for taking the time to offer a suggestion. TextWrangler has advanced quite a bit since I last used it.Unfortunately, though, Hebrew is not listed in the available text encodings in Preferences, and the user manual states, "TextWrangler supports editing in all languages which use left-to-right text input methods," inferring that languages written right-to-left are not supported. There is no function for switching the direction of text in the menus.
However, TextWrangler does have some functions that Tex-Edit Plus is missing, so I will probably start using it again for some tasks, except that it is a true text editor rather than a text editor / word processor hybrid, so multiple fonts and formatting functions are not available.
Thursday, August 31 2006 @ 09:01 AM PDT
Suggestion... - Daniel Staal
BBEdit, TextWrangler's big brother, has the same issue but can actually sort Arabic text correctly. Since they share the same text engine I would assume TextWrangler probably is the same.
Basically, they can handle the text data itself fine, they just don't have the display capablity to show it to you. Bare Bones Software correctly says 'not supported yet' because its not, but it might be useable for your needs anyway.
Thursday, September 07 2006 @ 10:13 AM PDT
Still no order/sorting capability, so no purchase yet - rubaiyat
You say you tried TextEdit, which I find extraordinarily good at unicode, but didn't say what shortcomings you found.If it is the lack of better formatting and page control, try iText Express which has built on TextEdit's open source code and has enormously more formatting and layout control. It is totally free so represents brilliant value.
I use it as my default word/text processor. It has line numbering bookmark and links, amongst many other features, but I couldn't see anything on sorting. You might want to talk to the developer and see what he can do.
Saturday, September 02 2006 @ 09:59 AM PDT
Suggestion... - Strider72
I haven't done this (I don't understand any languages that don't use the roman alphabet), but you might try using the free TextWrangler for this. It's a pure text editor (i.e. no formatting) but is very good with different text encodings.Try this and see if it works:
1. Copy text you want to sort.
2. Paste into TextWrangler
3. TextWrangler can sort the lines for you.
4. Copy/ Paste sorted text back into Mellel
Worth a shot. Good luck.
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Wednesday, August 30 2006 @ 08:35 PM PDT