polytrope blog

Mac OS X word processing: Mellel

Posted by William Porter, 8 May 2003 03:42

Earlier this evening, I downloaded Mellel for the second or third time. Mellel is a word processor for Mac OS X written by RedleX, an Israeli company. As usual, this post ended up in BBEdit for final HTML-ification, but I drafted most of it in Mellel and explored the new beta as I wrote. It’s a very nice piece of work, so nice that after working with it for about an hour, I broke down and bought it.

When I was an academic — well, not at the start of my career, but let’s say from 1985 to 1998 — I was a word processin’ fool. Nowadays I do most of my writing in BBEdit. But I do need a word processor for correspondence, contracts, writing documentation, and a few other uses. Most of what I write does not get printed, it gets converted into Adobe Acrobat files for electronic distribution; but it needs formatting nonetheless. If I don’t want to use Word — and I don’t — what are my options in OS X?

The undesirable options

I have AppleWorks and use the spreadsheet and the graphics modules regularly. But AppleWorks’ word processor is pathetic, genuinely painful to use. Removing a style from a paragraph is nearly impossible. I get mad every time I try to use the word processor in AppleWorks. I’d rather use Word. It’s that bad.

Then there’s Nisus Writer Express, which just released its public beta. I’m very disappointed in it. After Nisus announced (back in ‘87, it seems) that it was working on an OS X/Cocoa version of Nisus Writer, I waited patiently. When Nisus acquired or partnered with Okito a while ago, I kept waiting, but now, a bit less patiently, because I was excited. I had loved the Okito Composer preview and thought that any product with the old Nisus Writer’s features and Okito Composer’s user interface would have to be fantastic. Alas, it’s not. No styles, no tables, no footnotes. Apart from its really ugly icon, Nisus Writer Express has a lovely look to it — that comes from Okito Composer — but otherwise it’s not really ready to be called a “word processor” at all. It’s a text editor, and I’m hard pressed to see how it’s more useful than BBEdit or (better comparison) TexEdit.

Mariner Write

Then there’s Mariner Write. Mariner Software has been around for a very long time, and apparently they have been hard at work. Their Write is not as pretty as Nisus Writer Express, but it’s a mature and genuinely useful product — a real word processor. Mariner Write provides most or all of the features that most users really need in a word processor — styles, tables, notes, columns, spelling, mail merge — without all the features that most users don’t need. You can define your own keyboard shortcuts for most commands and the toolbars are customizable. And perhaps best of all, at least for small business users or those who would like an alternative to AppleWorks, Mariner Software also sells a spreadsheet, Mariner Calc. I haven’t tried it, but if Calc is as good as Write, and they play nicely together, then it's not as true as I once thought that the Word/Excel partnership has no competition on the Mac.

Still, I'm not excited about Mariner Write. It has the OS X Aqua look, but it seems a bit tacked on, the way it does also in Eudora X. In short, the program lacks sex appeal. This is not because the graphical elements of the user interface are poorly designed; they're fine. It's rather that Mariner Write is unoriginal. (Note: Initially, I had written "so unoriginal." That was unfair. Write is not strikingly unoriginal, just ordinarily so.) Mariner Write has no formatting palettes, no sidebars; commands are issued entirely through menus, dialogs, and the very conventional button bars. Its menus are equally conventional, even cliche: View, Format, Insert, Font, Size, Style… The inclusion of Font, Size and Style menus is an archaism and a complete waste of valuable user-interface real estate. I remember vividly how irresistible the Font menu was circa 1985, but do intelligent writers in 2003 really change fonts manually often enough to justify giving Fonts their own special menu? I hope not. In the same way, the Size and Style menus are there only because Mac text-editing operations have always had these menus. But they don't make much sense. You should be using style sheets for formatting. (It's sad, but no coincidence that the Style menu has nothing to do with styles — they're in the Format menu!) The button bars are also a bit boring. The buttons mostly duplicate commands available through the menus; some users may find this redundancy desirable, but I find this, too, a waste of space.

Now Mariner Write will get almost any job done and done pretty well. In fairness to it, perhaps I should admit that most users, even most Mac users, are, like cats, creatures of habit and resistant to change. Many Mac users may find Mariner Write's instant familiarity something to be grateful for. Me, I'd like a word processor with a bit more pizazz. Write doesn’t give me the feeling that its developers spent a lot of time late at night arguing about what a twenty-first century word processor ought to be like. The same thing goes for Word, of course, in spades. There’s nothing OS X about it at all, aside from the fact that it runs.

Last but not least, Mellel

And now here’s this new version of Mellel. I dismissed this program a while back as being primarily for people who needed to do Hebrew. My mistake. It's not quite as mature an application as Mariner Write, by which I mean that it seems to be missing some features that the developers are probably going to add as soon as they can. But like, wow, it’s come a long way since I last looked at it. And I think that the makers of Mellel have done that ground-up thinking that the designers of Mariner Write did not do. Mellel doesn’t just look different, it works a bit different. And the differences make really good sense and they’re useful.

The menus in Mellel are: File, Edit, Insert, Page, Paragraph, and Character. Page, Paragraph and Character all do the same sort of thing: they offer commands to format those aspects of your document. And all three offer savable styles. What a brilliant idea — page styles, just like paragraph and character styles! It’s simple and logical. The buttons in the "button bar" -- really, the upper part of the window -- do not duplicate commands in the menus, but rather provide the main means of accessing certain formatting palettes. (Each palette has a command-equivalent in the Window menu, which does not seem to contradict the point I'm making.) Mellel’s palettes are well designed: they have nearly everything I’d like them to have, yet they are much simpler than the palettes in Word or Nisus Writer Express. The palettes complement the handful of dialogs that the program relies upon, for example, when you use the character style dialog to define a character style, the character palette appears so that you can select font, size, etc. Character and paragraph styles — the most important single features of a word processor — while rather different from the styles in MacWrite Pro 1.5, are about as well implemented, and I can't praise anything more highly than that. It’s easy to define a style, redefine a style, apply a style or remove it. Mellel's styles are more limited than Word's (no borders, for example), but more powerful than styles in AppleWorks, and about five times easier to use than styles in either of those competitors.

Mellel does double-byte languages like Hebrew and Chinese; so do Mariner Write and Nisus Writer. It has basic but fairly nice support for tables. Multiple undos. The user interface is so streamlined and uncluttered that I didn’t realize initially that Mellel could do anything but footnotes. But it can: it does footnotes, endnotes and a whole bunch of other notes, in fact, I’m not sure that it doesn’t have the advantage of Word in this respect.

And it costs $19. That’s not a typo: nineteen dollars. Nisus Writer Express, by comparison, costs $60 and Mariner Write's download method of purchase costs $70. Actually, Nisus Writer Express and Mariner Write do not seem to me overpriced. Word for $400 —- that’s overpriced. But Mellel’s pricing is a spectacular bargain.

Mellel has some limitations: no columns, no outliner, no automatic numbering of lists, no support for regular expressions in searches. But as far as I can tell, it has only one problem that would make it hard for me to use every day: It uses the brushed metal look. This is a UI no-no. Apple’s own guidelines state that the brushed metal “skin” is supposed to be used only in applications that provide an interface to a digital peripheral, e.g. iTunes.

This was first brought to my attention in a blog entry by John Gruber. Gruber complains about Safari’s use of the brushed metal skin. But Mellel’s use of the same look is a grosser demonstration of what’s wrong with it. I have to confess that I find this problem pretty off-putting. The brushed metal frame makes me feel like I’m reaching into a box to edit the document.

So?

I keep hearing these rumors that Apple is writing its own word processor. If so, I pray that they don't let anybody involved with AppleWorks work on it. But if the rumor is untrue, it doesn't matter much, because OS X users already have two very capable word alternatives to Microsoft Word: the dull but grown-up Mariner Write and the exciting, if somewhat immature Mellel. Perhaps because I'm not very grown up myself, I find Mellel particularly impressive. If you are not one of Microsoft’s captives, I recommend that you give it a look.

Postscript 5/8/2003 11:35 p.m.: Jim Conley, a fellow member of the H-Mac user group and discussion list (mainly for academic users of the Mac) asked if Mellel supports macros. Good question. The answer is, not as far as I can see, and no support for AppleScript either. Mariner Write has no macro feature but does support AppleScript, at least to some extent. Nisus Writer Express supports AppleScript and also allows you to write macros, although apparently those macros must be written in Perl. It's worth noting perhaps that, while Nisus Writer Express has the advantage of Mariner Write and Mellel in this one respect, BBEdit beats the stuffing out of all of them.

Postscript 5/11/2003 11:53: I have learned that "Mellel" is Hebrew for "Text."

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