Mellel isn’t for everybody, but I’ve learned to appreciate it. At the same time, it lacks some useful functionality Microsoft Word has had for ages. And by daring to start fresh and re-examine what a word processor’s interface should look like, Mellel provides a comfortable and productive working environment for the writer, along with additional tools and characteristics that make it a particularly apt piece of software for technical writing. Mellel is refreshing because it makes no pretense of aping the Microsoft Word interface – the trap most contenders fall into, including StarOffice, Abiword, and others – opting instead to build a word processor with a new focus and design. Its biggest selling point is its compatibility in a world where the Word format is near-universal. Despite its popularity, Word for the Mac has lots of problems, including the semi-frequent crash, annoying dialogue boxes, and high memory consumption. Appleworks, Apple’s older word processor, has been essentially left to dry on the pre-OS X vine in lieu of Pages, Apple’s OS X offering (and part of the iworks suite). Several word processors are available for the Macintosh, but none is more common than Microsoft Word, which is completely compatible with the Windows version. But a friend with a Mac introduced me to a word processor that caught my interest immediately: Mellel, and when I switched from Linux to the Mac, Mellel became my word processor of choice for research and technical papers. I first bumped into Mellel when I was a graduate student ploughing through a degree in development economics, using StarOffice on SUSE Linux 9.0.
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