Mellel vs. Pages 2

Robert,

I have both–-and Word & InDesign too--and I like both.

I use both but for different things. I initially picked up Mellel for it support of Hebrew & Arabic, but ended up really liking the interface and my productivity over Word was stellar.

Of course I use Word for collaborative business, but I do not use it any longer for all things.

I'm a fairly neat document creator and I liked the power and implementation of the styles feature. Especially for longer proposals and teaching material.

Now concerning Pages. I am a new pages user about 45 days. I only have experience with Pages 2. And I'll tell you something--I have been able to produce complicated reports and teaching material - like in no time. I was amazed how quickly I could create a professional document.

I did a comparative analysis document using tables that would have taken several days in Word. I did something similar a couple of years ago. In Pages I did the whole thing up to my standards in one day.

I have been using Pages nearly exclusively recently, both to learn the program and because it is such a joy to use.

At this point I think that Mellel is excellent for long text documents and Pages is excellent for all reports and format-intensive work.

I do believe that one uses the correct tool to get the job done. So I use InDesign for type-set quality docs and Word for that forced-collaborative necessities. Illustrator for that occasional art work & page layout where it is better suited than InDesign.

But Pages is fast becoming my first tool of choice.
Hoped that helped a little.

-Alan

AlBook, TiBook, iMac, iBook Mac OS X (10.4.5) Corporate / mixed environment / multiple networks.

I have used Pages 2, Mellel, Nisus Writer Express (since 2.5) NeoOffice, and Word 2004. I have tended to do the following: for documents that I am writing primarily to share with students I use Pages 2 (export to PDF) or Nisus (native format is RTF). But when I write academic material I use Mellel. It gives me more control over footnote format, makes it possible to have both footnotes and endnotes, intergrates with Bookends, and so on. But there are still times that I need the other processors. I still find that Word gives me the best export to HTML and that is crucial when making documents for WebCT classes. NeoOffice has the best auto-complete feature of any word processor that I know, and when composing a document with lots of long Greek names in it, that can be wonderful since it learns them automatically, and then offers to auto-complete. I also have tended, like a previous response to your question, to fit my tools to the job. If I have to drop back to just one I would have to take Mellel (or possbily Nisus Writer Express). But as it stands in a given semester I have usually found a task that each did better than the others. Given the low prices of Pages 2 (I make all my classroom presentations in Keynote) and Mellel and Nisus, I have not been forced to use only one. Cheers!