![]() Less critical but still annoying was not being able to set default table formats in the Style sheet. All I wanted was a repeatable header whenever this happened. Not being able to set controls for tables breaking over the page was the most annoying element of Mellel. Table control: Yep, this is the biggie for me. Speaking of which, the memory of it is starting to give me nightmares again, and I'm not even asleep yet! Also, the process of formatting and setting tabs within the auto titles was a nightmare. Yet there are always last minute changes, meaning that I had to spend a couple of hours checking page references before handing in. A live, updating index is not even a feature anymore, it is just something that should be there.Ī static table of contents: Really, how annoying is this?! Because the Mellel TOC will not update in real time, I could not run it until the (almost) very last thing to do before submitting. I know I could do a "find", but that is a sequential process and is a poor substitute to seeing it laid out in front of you. Indexes are not required for dissertations or journal article writing, but gee it would have been a good feature to help with finding where key words appear first. No index feature: This was a major annoyance, but not a game breaker for a PhD. The formatting of auto titles should be part of the style sheet. I will try to deal with the least serious first (in my opinion, of course).Īuto titles: These were easy to use, but changes to formats can be problematic. All have been mentioned in this forum before, and I feel that a failure to address these features will impact on Mellel's viability. I am mentioning them not to bag Mellel, but to raise these issues as just-about-game-breakers. OK, I would like to mention the things that really irked me during the process. Finally, I will make a post on what can be done better. This is meant to be a positive contribution, not a rant. Later, I will report on what didn't work for me in Mellel. Once I put it all into a single Mellel doc, I found that I could easily navigate once I set the autotitles, and I immediately got a sense of the effort needed to complete the whole document. Consequently, I was perpetually in a composing mode. No complaints about Scrivener (except that their table handling is worse than not having table at all!!), but I found that I got too muddled in the myriad of documents, and my thoughts kept being restricted to the size of the sub-document. Interestingly, it wasn't until I finally abandoned Scrivener and moved permanently to Mellel that I started to make real progress in putting this thesis together. But most of all, because I always struggled with Word's style sheet design (I found that every time someone sent me a Word doc, it would do strange things to my Normal template), the structured style sheets in Mellel were a delight to use and very reliable. The inbuilt highlights of cross-references and citations made checking for orphans easy. It always opened nice and fast, even on my poor old MBPro with 4GB RAM. OK, so the first thing I want to say about Mellel is that it worked like a dream. I thought that I would write a series of critiques of Mellel based on my experiences, and based on a specific application of Mellel. I have just submitted my PhD thesis after writing it in Mellel.
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