Mellel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mellel (מלל, the Hebrew for "text") is a word processor for Mac OS X, purported to be especially suited for technical and academic writers. It is made by RedleX, a small software company from Israel. New features are added to the program every few months, many of which come from user suggestions.
Mellel's way of handling styles is designed to be easier to use and more intuitive than those in standard word processors. Its Replace Styles feature allows users to more easily reformat a large amount of text scattered throughout a document (a feature also present in OpenOffice.org Writer).
Languages with non-Latin alphabets, including Arabic, Hebrew and Korean are handled well due to its support for Unicode and OpenType fonts. Its user interface relies heavily on palettes.
Mellel has a distinctive way of handling footnotes, endnotes and comments, which are treated as different "streams" of a single text. This feature can also help keep different translations of the same text in sync.
Mellel provides tight integration with Bookends and Sente, bibliographical tools for managing citations. Academic writers should note that Mellel so far lacks support for cross-references, although this is projected to appear in later releases. It has good support for RTF import and export and rudimentary support for .doc files. The current version of Mellel (v. 2.1) introduced an XML-based file format.
