| Developer(s) | RedleX |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 2.9 / 15 August 2011 |
| Written in | Objective-C Cocoa |
| Operating system | Mac OS X |
| Type | Word processing |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | [1] |
Mellel (מלל, the Hebrew for "text") is a word processor for Mac OS X, developed since 2002 and marketed as 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. Its closest competitor is Nisus Writer Pro.
The most remarkable feature present in Mellel is its multilanguage support. Languages with non-Latin alphabets, including Arabic, Hebrew, Korean and Persian are handled well due to its support for Unicode and OpenType fonts. Its user interface relies heavily on palettes.
Mellel also presents a feature set suitable for working with long and complex documents, in order to match the needs of scholars and technical writers. Mellel has a unique way of handling styles, with a Replace Styles feature which is able to reformat a large amount of text scattered throughout a document (a feature also present in OpenOffice.org Writer and in Nisus Writer for Mac OS Classic). Mellel has a distinctive way of handling footnotes, endnotes and comments, which are treated as different "streams" of a single text, a feature which can help keep different translations of the same text in sync. Cross-references are also dealt with in a singular way by Mellel, which implemented this feature in version 2.5.
Due to its unique approach to implementing many of its features, Mellel lacks full compatibility with standard word processors, and this fact is often pointed out as one of its main shortcomings. Mellel does not support DOCX and ODT and it supports DOC only partially. It has, however, good support for RTF files and is able to export to PDF.
Mellel provides tight integration with Bookends and Sente, bibliographical tools for managing citations.
Another unique feature of Mellel is that starting with version 2.8 the company, Redlers, has announced that once one has purchased a licence, one is entitled to free updates for life.