In fact, many people have to write as part of their work - students and academics, technical writers, bloggers, journalists and columnists, copywriters, novelists, playwrights, poets, lawyers, doctors, business people, politicians and speechwriters. So, in an effort to make the review fit for all needs, I will look at the software from the perspective of a reasonably comprehensive cross-section of the writing community (but not including mathematicians, programmers etc who use specialised editors). A senior professor with an active research programme.I hope that this will cover the needs of students at all levels. A writer of literary fiction - books, plays and screenplays.A writer of large scale, multi volume, huge world fantasy fiction.A journalist with weekly columns and a blog.Their needs are very different to those of a student because most papers are written in collaboraton with others and they may be working in a number of different fields and over a very long time. The Story points are pretty nice.Also does pieces for media whenever asked. Mellel has a steeper learning curve, but it supports more stuff. Nisus is intuitive to the point of almost not needing a manual. Nisus can give some trouble with things like the Power Find feature. That reflows the text and gives me the narrow window I want. I can squish the window into the narrow size I like, swap style sets, and set the zoom down. Actually, that might be better, since compact view clips off the margins. Or, you could change the margins in the page styles. Since Mellel's compact view doesn't rewrap lines (drat, again!) when you shrink a window horizontally, I have an alternate style set for narrow windows. I find I can live with two views, a narrow and a wide view. Then, for what Scrivener would call a compile, three mouse clicks swaps the style set. Otherwise, you get a simple Notepad-like view. The compact view gives you page breaks (drat!) but they are just single pixel lines. Since Mellel supports page styles, you can rip out your headers, footers, and line numbers. It tries to enforce WYSIWYG, but there are ways around some of that for the committed rebel. Mellel appears to be much better with epub export, with features like spine support. In Nisus, I write in draft view with most things turned off. Mail-merge, for one thing, and it's clean and easy to use. I'm a long-time Nisus fan, and will probably always use it for correspondence. But most of my serious work is done elsewhere, nowadays.Ĭlick to expand.I agree. I just continue to use them because I grew up with them, and they feel like home. And there's an awesome LaTeX-macro for business letters.įor me, like-Word is a dying class of application. But for other sciences Mellel is a great choice, and is popular there.)Įven the aforementioned business letters I could to with the publishing program. You CAN do it, but it's not comfortable once you get to a certain level of math or physics, which is already fairly basic. I mean, it doesn't have anything special for it. LaTeX is damn near perfectly reliable and stable with cross-references, citations, and getting a great looking formatting out (though Mellel comes close on stability, unless you need math. Takes all of that away except for just the amount I need for making my workplace comfortable, and then puts it back when needed. So for almost anything but short business letters, I use Scrivener. If I want formatting, I use a desktop publishing program (for me, that's Affinity Publisher.) While writing, word processors force me to deal with it although it's absolutely unnecessary. A novel is just a stream of words, essentially, and may end up formatted very differently, say, for the hardcover, paperback, or end up as an e-book, where the formatting is out of the hands of even the publisher and can be changed by the reader. Things like margins, paper size, where to put the footnotes etc.īut for a lot of my writing that's all not important. These things still have a strong formatting focus that I have to deal with. Thing is, they're still 'traditional' word processors AKA like-Word. I have a hard time deciding which is better. Click to expand.Mellel is a great word processor.
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