The holidays are over and a full year of assiduous creativity stretches as far as the exasperated eye can see. To relieve the pain somewhat, we have some useful and some not-so-useful Mellel stuff for you.

Table of Contents:

Mellel News:

• Mellel 1.7.1 is nigh
• The family way
• Yet another good review

What's going on:

• Patently unpatentable

Mellel Tips:

• Cutting it short
  
  

Mellel News

Mellel 1.7.1 is nigh -- Mellel 1.7 is history, and Mellel 1.7.1 is right around the corner. Here are some of the highlights in this version.

• Extended RTF import and export: Mellel 1.7.1 will offer robust support for importing and exporting RTF, the open Rich Text Format by offered by Microsoft. Among the options supported when exporting are: Fonts, bold and italic, size, underline and strikethrough, colours, superscript and subscript, margins, indents, tabs, line spacing, space below and above the line, page size, page margins, footnotes, endnotes, tables (including cell border width and colour and diagonal lines and distance of table from left edge) auto-numbers, variables, dates and citations.
  Advance RTF import was already in place with earlier versions of Mellel and supported most of those options when importing RTF files, but it also offers some significant improvements like: recognising font type (Swiss, Roman, decor, etc.), improved line spacing support, default tab support, improved support for tables with irregular (i.e., joined) cells, table cells borders, width and colour, and more.
• Font Matching: To help you import RTF more efficiently and avoid the common problems of mismatched fonts, Mellel 1.7.1 offers a strong tool for manual and automatic font matching. When importing an RTF file, Mellel will now use an advanced font matching mechanism that will match the fonts in the RTF file and the fonts in your system almost perfectly. When it will encounter fonts that cannot be matched (typically,fonts that do not exist in your system) it will display those fonts and allow you to match them manually (by selecting a substitute font from your fonts menu) and even save the match into a special font-matching file that will be used in the future as a match for the unknown font.
• MS .doc import: Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) offers support for opening and saving documents in MS Word .doc format. Mellel 1.7.1 will support this option. We do not wish to pretend that this support is very extensive or powerful. Our RTF import and export options are far more powerful than this option. At heart, it is similar to the RTF support offered by TextEdit and similar text editors. Still, if you need to open .doc files with support for font, font face, size and similar attributes, you'll be able to do it with Mellel 1.7.1 without being forced to use third party products.
• Bulleted and numbered lists: The number one question we've received when we issued Mellel 1.7 with auto-numbers was: how do I use this to created a bulleted or a numbered list. A very good question indeed because although you could do that with our Auto-numbers feature, it required a lot of effort and the results were, well, not very pretty. All this will be a thing of the past with Mellel 1.7.1, which will fully support creating bulleted and numbered lists.
  As usual, this feature supports all that you've come to expect in such a feature with other word processors, plus some neat additions of our own.
• And some more cool stuff: But we're not telling... Not just yet.
  
  

The family way -- OK, a rotten pun, but a well intended one! We have added a new option to our order page: the family pack. Those of you scratching their heads right now and wonder "where have I heard that before?" are scratching correctly: it's a cheap marketing schtick we've shamelessly copied from Apple: buy the family pack and get a license you can install on up to 5 different computers in your household. Shameless we are, but cheap we are more: the family license costs only $49. That's less than $10 per copy, only three cups of overpriced coffee, only three years' worth of wages at the Nike east-Asian child-slave plantations, only three... OK, I'll stop now.

• Our trusty (and a bit slow) purchase page
  
  

Bookends revisited -- OK, now that I've taken my medications and regained partial marketing sobriety -- Sonny software, the makers of the excellent Bookends reference manager and bibliography, offers a 20 per cent discount for Mellel registered users when purchasing Bookends. The official price is $99, but that will drop to $79.20 or even $55.20 (a Student order) if you are a Mellel user. We plan to offer a similar discount but unless you're already a Bookends user, buying Mellel first and the discounted Bookends after that makes much more sense.

• Sonny Software order page
  

Yet another good review -- The excellent French Mac magazine AvosMAC published a very positive review of Mellel in its no. 36 issue (January, 2003), giving Mellel four out of five starts, calling it "magnifique et moderne shareware qui couvrira l'essentiel de vos besoins y compris d'ordre professionnel" (a magnificent and modern shareware that will cover most of your needs, including your professional needs). The review appears only in the printed version of the magazine.

• The review
  

What's Going On

Patently unpatentable -- Christmas is hardly over and Microsoft already has some fresh new schemes for all conspiracy theorists to munch on. The scheme du jour is Microsoft application to the European patent office and to its New Zealand counterpart to patent the specific parsing of XML (short for: eXtensible Mark-up Language) word processing documents. In layman's terms: it applied for a patent on MS Word 2003 readers and convertors. If accepted, this patent will grant Microsoft full control over which person or company may or may not be able to read or convert MS Word 2003 or later documents.
The thinking behind this is very simple: while Microsoft noisily ballyhooed the "opening" of MS Office document, using the open XML technology and ditching the old propriety format of MS Word, it now tries to make XML itself or at least some interpretations of it its propriety. Microsoft believes it can patent this because XML is not a specific "mark-up" language but just a general description of how such a mark-up language should look like. Every application that uses XML must conform by some very basic rules (essentially, the way an open tag (<Tag>) and a close tag (</Tag>) should look). The rest, including the specific tags used and the specific tree of options (schema) is invented by the makers of the application. For example, to mark a string of text as appearing in bold face an application can use the customary <b>this is bold</b> mark-up, but can just as well use <Heroic>this is bold</Heroic> for the same purpose. If the application knows what to do when the tag appears, it doesn't matter what term is used.
It is not clear what exactly Microsoft aims for, since patentability of the specific usage of an open standard is dubious. It may be simply a part of Microsoft newly found patenting vigour. In recent months it seems to be trying to patent just about everything it ever did. Sinister minds might comment that usually when you go to bed after a day of working with Microsoft standards you are very likely to wake up with flees.

• Microsoft's patent application to the European Patent Office