Mellel an underappreciated Mac gem

Posted by Dennis Sellers Dec 16, 2004 at 12:05am

Mellel, the Mac OS X word processor from Redlex is one of the underappreciated gems in Mac software. A simple, clean and extremely fast application for handling text, the multilingual word processor offers page, paragraph, and character styles, outline, tables, headers and footers, citations and bibliography, tabs and more—and all for US$39.

I admit that Mellel is one of those applications that always flew under my radar until recently. However, I’ve been using it for two weeks now and am very impressed. Though I’ll keep Office 2004 around (Mellel can import Word documents, but they open with oodles of funky characters), I’ll be using the Redlex app for everyday word processing.

It’s elegant and has an interface that reminds me of Apple’s iLife apps, especially iTunes. It’s so user-friendly that you can jump right in and begin word processing away without reading the instructions. Speaking of which, Mellel has a very thorough (as in 300-plus pages) user guide in PDF format.

What’s more, Mellel also lacks some glitches I’ve run across between Word and certain system utilities. For example, when I’m running Word and You Control from You Software, the Microsoft app tends to crash when I’m cutting and pasting items. As best I can tell, You Control’s clipboard and Word’s clipboard (both of which can hold multiple items) don’t get along. Mellel doesn’t have a multiple clipboard feature and works fine with You Control, as well as every other system utility with which I’ve tested it.

You can tackle footnotes and endnotes in a variety of formats and apply some unique paragraph formatting. Mellel also boasts extensive table formatting feature and a spell checker that can do its thing even as you write.

The latest version (1.7.5) of the word processor adds a nifty font matching feature and Compact View. The Import Font matching panel appears when you import .doc or RTF files and lets you match the fonts in the imported file with the fonts in your system. As of version 1.7.5, when you’re importing RTF or .doc files Mellel uses a smart algorithm to match fonts by name, PostScript name, type of font (e.g., a Roman or sans-serif) and even by the generating application. Font matches where the smart matching failed are highlighted. The font features don’t work as seamlessly with Word as I’d like, but it operates smoothly with RTF docs. What’s more, a “Make Default” option lets you save your favourite matches to a special font matching file. Once saved, those matches will be automatically applied.

Mellel’s Compact View allows viewing only the contents of the page, with a minimal margin around the page and between pages. You can shrink a document window to a much smaller size, saving around 30 per cent in window “real estate.” Plus, you can set your default for document view in the preferences. You can also change it from the Window menu, of course.

All Mellel’s palettes are now 15 percent narrower and around 15 percent shorter, which allows for a better fit with smaller screen sizes such as PowerBooks and iBooks. Additionally, the page view is now centered (horizontally) when you change the window’s width. This option works in both the regular and Compact view.

One of the really cool features of the software is its Main and Secondary font function that lets you use two fonts at the same time for keying in different languages or scripts. And it handles the size gaps automatically. If you deal with multilingual text, you’ll also appreciate the fact that Mellel is bidirectional (right/left, left/right) and can implement Kashida justification—which is how Arabic and Persian characters line up—through the Character Appearance palette.

It’s probably just a pet peeve of mine, but I do like grammar checkers with my word processor. Of course, at Mellel’s low price, adding a third-party utility to do this is feasible. Another minor irritant was that when I selected a whole document’s text and changed fonts, all bold and italic characters would revert to “regular” styling though that’s not what I intended or wanted.

Still, if you don’t need the plethora of features that Microsoft Word offers (or its price tag), Mellel should fit your needs nicely. It’s what the word processing component of AppleWorks should be like today.

Besides the regular $39 price, an educational license is $29 and a five-pack of licenses is $59.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10

Have a product you’d like us to review? Send e-mail to dsellers@macsimumnews.com

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