We pointed out Planbook last week, which should make lots of lesson planners happy I'm going to cheer the hearts of language students with the news of an update to Mellel, the polyglot word processor for Mac, and also point to Scrivener, a powerful project management environment for writers in academic and creative settings.Īs Mat mentioned back in March, Mellel is a word processor that keeps the needs of academic writers clearly in focus. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be highlighting products, tools and techniques to help students and teachers launch into the school year with style and ease. Scanned and Unscanned citations in the text are highlighted, and you can open them and easily set special options (e.g., page numbers, omitting author or year).įinally, there's the bibliography: You can use the preferences to set how it will appear in the document, move it around in the document, and otherwise manipulate it.It's that time of year again, academicians. The Bibliography palette in Mellel allows you to view all the citations in the document, navigate to them, switch to a bibliography manager, scan, unscan, rescan, etc. Mellel offers you an easy way to handle citations and bibliographies, keeping them always in check, and preventing this delicate task from becoming tangled and annoying. Once you've tried this with Mellel, it would be tough imagining how you could do without those up until now. You control how your document headings look, how the outline will look, how your Table of Contents will look, and so on. With most of those, Mellel is the only word processor that allows you to do this automatically and reliably. Headings are easy, right? You just click the right style (in Mellel, the right auto-title) and there you have it.īut with Mellel you can achieve so much more: you can set your title to look differently than its numbering, set which headings will be numbered and if they'll reset the numbering, set headings to always appear at the top of the page, add a running header that changes dynamically, insert tabs and line breaks in a heading (but not in the ToC), set the content of the outline (to include just the title, for example), force appending body text to headings, and so on. To streamline your document's content, you can view elements such as captions for figures, tables, charts, and so on separately - and review them one by one.Īnother excellent streamlining tool is Mellel's find: It allows you to create GREP-like searches, save them and create sets of Find Actions - allowing you to perform dozens of searches all at once. The outline pane gives you a bird's eye view of your entire document, and lets you, tells you where you are, and lets you move things around easily. Mellel's superb Outline feature is just the tool to achieve that. Looks matter, consistency matters even more.Īs your document gets longer, it gets harder to keep all things in it in order. In Mellel, flexibility when setting columns or text does not come at the expense of of getting the results you want to get: Images with text flowing around them stay where you set them to stay, columns stay balanced, and headings don't go strolling down the page just for fun. Looks matter, and Mellel has no competitors when it comes to controlling the way your document looks and creating consistent, predictable, and beautiful looking results.Consistency and predictability are the most important things when dealing with text and images. In fact, we'll openly claim: Mellel is the most powerful word processor for the Mac OS. or just a letter to your aunt (she's on Facebook, though).ĭo not let Mellel's speedy launch, nimble performance, or humble footprint mislead you - there are no bells and whistles, but there is power. Mellel was designed to allow you to create long and sophisticated documents - from a book to a dissertation. Mellel is a powerful and reliable word processor for people who are serious about writing.
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