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| Note: This is an old newsletter. Some of the links may not lead to where they're supposed to lead. |
About Mellel 1.7.5, our extended Family Pack, the demise of FrameMaker and two little tips
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
Mellel Tips:
Mellel News
Mellel 1.7.5 is coming -- We've promised you some "neat additions" with our upcoming version. As you'll see below, they are truly neat, and the main course isn't too shabby either. Mellel 1.7.5 is expected at the beginning of April.
- RTF Export and Import: Mellel 1.7.5 finally solves, for the most part, the ancient RTF problem. This version offers extensive support for both importing and exporting RTF, with some special additions for font matching. Here are the main highlights:
Text: font, size, colour, superscript/subscript, underline, strikethrough; paragraph: margins. tabs, tabs, space above/below, line spacing; tables: table borders (colour, width, visibility), horizontal cell merges, cell widths, table horizontal position, diagonals; footnotes and endnotes: numbering notation (Arabic, Latin etc.), start at, restart at every page; page: size, orientations, margins; special options: Auto-numbers, lists, variables, dates and citations are supported, but flattened to regular text with export.
- DOC Import and export (Panther only): Offers support for the main stylistic options like font, size, colour, margins, etc., but does not support tables and footnotes or endnotes.
- RTF and .doc font matching: Our innovation de jour. Offers you the option to match the fonts in an RTF document or a .doc document when importing them into Mellel. The font matching panel also offers the option to save matches as a the default match and includes several matching options to suite documents originating on Windows or from Mac OS X applications (Cocoa).
- Bulleted and numbered lists: This new option is very similar to the one offered in Other Word Processors (OWP, AKA MS Word) but with two important improvements: A. It works and doesn't drive you bunkers; B. It offers styles, so you can save and reuse any list style you want. Here are the main highlights in our implementation:
- List styles: you can create, edit, save and delete styles. The styles can be changed and saved per-level (and not just globally). You can also easily switch between styles, apply different styles to different lists, copy and paste styling, and so on.
- Style control: You can control every aspect of a list: symbol, indent, and next level position, symbol type, symbol format, symbol style, and start at number.
- Live editing and automation: Once created, the list more or less run itself: press Return and the next item in the list is created. In addition you can also edit list properties "live" with the positioning of elements changing as you edit them.
So far, all the new features should be familiar to those of you who received the newsletter in the past. Now comes the "neat" part -- and neat it is indeed. Here are some of the surprises:
- Compact view: With Mellel 1.7.5 we've created a new compact view, eliminating both the background ("the grey thing" around pages) and margins. And if that wasn't enough we've also...
- Narrowed palettes and minimal window size: You can now set the window to a minimal size of 525x322 pixels (saving around 40 percent in window size). The palettes also shrank by 15 per cent or so, making it possible to easily fit a Mellel document window and the palettes on smaller screens. And to make things even more convenient...
- The view is automatically centred: That is, when you shrink or expand the document window, the document area automatically centres itself.
- Copy special: Allows you to copy selectively. You can copy character attributes, paragraph attributes, list attributes and plain text. When pasting, the text where you paste will change according to the type of copy you've made.
The Office Pack -- As some of you already know, we have created a new purchase option, the Family Pack. This new option allows you to buy five copies of Mellel for just $49 -- A 80 per cent discount(!) compared with buying 5 copies separately.
Now we've decided that a small business can be very similar to a family in terms of the number of computers and decided to expand the Family Pack options to also include small offices and home offices of 5 (one pack) or 10 (2 packs) computers.
What's Going On
No Mac FrameMaker -- The recent announcement by Adobe that it will discontinue the development of FrameMaker's Mac version have once again raised speculations about Adobe's commitment to the Mac platform and the future of other products by Adobe on the Mac. While such speculations are not without merit, FrameMaker's demise should not be regarded as signifying anything more than it is -- the disappearance of another niche product from the portfolio of a company that do not want to support such products.
The announcement about FrameMaker's demise is just the last in a series of announcements about Windows only products or discontinued products for the Mac coming from Adobe. Among those were Atmosphere (a 3D application), Encore (DVD-authoring), Premiere (video editing) and Photoshop Album (digital photo album).
This ominous looking list, however, becomes much less alarming when you stop looking at it as a group and start examining its items one by one. With most of the products on the list, Adobe's decision start to make sense.
Over the last few years, Adobe focused on products and markets that generate a great income or have a dominant position in their portion of the market, gradually discontinuing all its niche products. This is what happened to LiveMotion -- the ill fated "Flash-killer" -- which was discontinuted because it failed to gain enough market share. This is also the real reason behind dumping the Mac version for Premiere and opting not to develop a Mac version at all for Encore and Photoshop Album -- in all three cases, Apple offers equivalent or better products for less money. No company can compete with a product that comes with every new Mac.
In FrameMaker's case, much like what happened before with PageMaker, Adobe opted to concentrate on one revenue-generating product -- InDesign -- at the expense of all its other products in this area. If you take a look at Adobe's Print Publishing products' page and note that FrameMaker was excluded from its "Creative Suite" you'd get the picture: InDesign is in, all the rest are out. Adobe will not even explicitly commit to issuing a new version of FrameMaker for Windows. FrameMaker's development pace slowed down significantly over the last couple of years and in its announcement Adobe only mentions "development efforts," avoiding any direct mention of version 8.
"Thank you Steve" -- No harm in poking fun at Apple from time to time, isn't there?
Mellel Tips
Copying from Mozilla -- Those of you who are using Mozilla (or its various incarnation) have probably encountered problems copying and pasting from it to Mellel. In many cases, after pasting the text from Mozilla into a Mellel document the document looks blank, as if nothing had happened.
Not true. The text is pasted, but due to a bug in Mozilla it is pasted with a font size and line spacing of 0 (Zero). To solve this you need to:
- Choose Edit > Select all.
- Choose the Regular paragraph style from the Paragraph menu.
Direction menu -- Missing the option to write from right to left in other applications beside Mellel? Well, you're half-lucky: No other application on Mac OS X offers full right-to-left writing functionality, but with those who offer some such functionality you can use a new utility called Direction Menu by Nir Soffer. The site is in Hebrew, but if you click on the version number link you'd be able to download it.
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