Today saw the release of Mellel 2.0, the best academic word processor I've found for Mac OS X. What was already a solid application is made more mainstream with the features added in this release including

• Hyphenation
• Columns and section styles
• Improved RTF support
• Keep with next and Keep options (think widow and orphan controls on steroids)
• Space at top of page/column
• Table frames line type
• Document setup: Added inside/outside margins and background color
• Page style colour: Added colour options to page styles
• Navigating: Page up and Page Down keyboard navigation
• Dictionary access (Tiger only)
• View options: Several additions
• Find special codes: Some additions
• Moving tabs: You can now move the end margin beyond tabs.
• Restart Note options: Now with every page range or section too.

Visit the Mellel site to get the full list of improvements and new features.

There are actually quite a few more improvements than this, but these were the biggies. If you're not familiar with Mellel, you probably are thinking, "Big deal. Word's done all that for years." Yes, you're right, but what you don't know is what Mellel was already capable of including the best handling I've seen of unicode fonts on the Mac, and especially for me, Greek and Hebrew typefaces. Mellel's ability to use right to left languages such as Hebrew are far superior to most word processors, especially on the Mac platform. Further, Mellel integrates well with bibliographic/citation software such as Bookends or Sente which is crucial for academic writing.

With the more mainstream features added in the 2.0 release, Mellel is now set to be the best word processor on the Mac not just for academic writing but for any standard user. There is a bit of a learning curve for using Mellel because it was built from the ground up as a word processor that was not simply trying to be a less expensive alternative to Microsoft Word. Therefore, it doesn't do everything like MS Word does. Many of the "standard" word processing procedures have been rethought. However, the downloadable user manual is very straightforward, and the average user can be up and running in a short while.

Although I was part of the beta test for version 2.0, I wasn't able to contribute too much because it hit in the middle of my preparing for comps. But I've been using the beta for the past three weeks for everyday use and I found it to be incredibly stable. With the final release of the product, it should be even more solid now. For any of my fellow classmates at SBTS, I have also contributed a term paper template that adheres to the SBTS/Turabian style guide. It is available in the downloads section at the Mellel site.

Although the price for Mellel has gone up with version 2.0, it is still a bargain at $49.99 regular price and $34.99 academic price. Users of previous versions (such as myself) were able to upgrade for free.

I'm working on a post for later this week that gives more detail as to why I've dropped MS Word after 13 years and switched to Mellel for serious writing. Keep watching this space.