![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, this is made clear in the software's blurb. Strictly speaking, it's an authoring tool whose output should be sent to a word processor for final layout. To be fair to Scrivener, it's not really a word processor and is the odd one out here. Next down – and it pains us to say this – is Scrivener. For a free application, it's mightily impressive, but you get what you pay for. Mellel excels at document structuring and cross-referencing, but it's too idiosyncratic and clunky to recommend, and 's standout property is its lack of a price tag. Two applications fall at the first hurdle in our race for the word processor crown. And of the other three, there's very little between them – Pages, Nisus Writer Pro and Scrivener all show an admirable understanding of Mac conventions, with Scrivener fractionally doing so in the most pleasing manner. sadly apes Word in these regards, not least in its inability to use C and the up and down arrows to jump to the start and end of a document.Įlsewhere, Mellel uses Mac OS X conventions and widgets, but presents them in a way that's akin to an unholy union between iTunes and BBEdit. A pity, then, that once you get away from the main window, Word appears transitionary, with inconsistent dialogs, an ignorance of common Mac shortcuts and a lack of support for built-in services. On the face of it, Word finally looks and feels like a Mac OS X application. Microsoft sometimes pays scant regard to such things, but the latest Word is an improvement. You expect things to work in a certain way across every application and for common conventions to be adhered to. One reason for using a Mac is interface consistency. In terms of exporting back to Word, advanced styling could still be lost occasionally, but again Pages nosed in front of. DOCX-wise, however, Pages' blunders were less of an issue. Neither application got things entirely right: both were confused by Word template cover pages, and while Pages floundered with text styles, couldn't correctly deal with image styles and placement. Surprisingly, lags behind Apple's Pages. Nisus Writer Pro also grabbed tables (if not their styling) from DOCX files and made a stab at including images and layout from DOCs, but generally messed things up. And results proved variable with the DOC and DOCX files we tested.Įvery app bar Mellel managed to rip text from our documents (Mellel was fine with DOC files, but stumbled when confronted with DOCX), although Scrivener managed nothing further. ![]() To start, it preserved my Notebook document’s structure and linked the endnotes in the HTML view which was beautiful to behold.Although using an alternative to Word is fine, there's a chance you'll occasionally need to open, edit and save documents created using Microsoft's application. When I repeated this experiment, and opened my thesis outline on Ulysses, it also was clear some of the usefulness of this program. However, when I imported my MS Word Notebook into Mellel it did not keep my endnotes or acknowledge the sections. Mellel, unlike Ulysses, is known for allowing users to have multiple types of footnotes/endnotes. It may even present said outlines even more effectively than Microsoft Notebook. I can see, though from playing around with the titles/headings/etc., how useful Mellel’s features would be for creating outlines for a thesis structure. Also, typewriter mode is fun if you miss using typewriters (especially since one of the few places on campus that still had typewriters available back when I was an undergraduate has had its original building condemned and is being rebuilt).īut I know what you really want to know: can I use this to write my thesis? Well, to get a better idea I inputted my thesis outline into the software from MS Word for Mac 2011 Notebook layout. Typewriter mode allows you to focus on the sentence you are writing and encourage you to keep your writing and your story moving forward, instead of getting stuck editing the same sentence again and again. Text in Markdown in the background, HTML version in the foreground! Easily set easy to see writing goals! ![]()
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