Mellel 6.2 is Here!

Mellel 6.2 introduces several key improvements and enhancements in bibliography and citations, word format support, equations, tables of contents, writing scripts support and more.

Bibliography Enhancements

The Bibliography palette's Citations in document list is now much more useful and easy to use. The list now shows you all the citations in the document, in order of appearance. Clicking a citation navigates to that citation location, and double-clicking opens it for editing. You can also option-click to show the reference in Bookends. Finally, a handy context menu allows you explicitly access these options.

The Edit Citation dialog also received attention. The layout is much more concise and clear, and a couple of esoteric (and rather confusing) options were removed.

Word Format Support For Comments

Mellel supported import and export of comments in RTF format for a long time, but with Word Format (DOCX), this support has been sorely lacking. With Mellel 6.2 this omittance is finally fixed. Comments in DOCX documents are now imported into Mellel, and comments in Mellel documents are exported to DOCX documents.

Better Equations

Equations, added to Mellel in version 6.1, are crisp and nice, which is a reason to rejoice, but some tiny annoyance is still lurking in the background, literally.

You see, the equations produced by the Equation panel have a white background. Usually this is not big deal, as the vast majority of documents have a white background anyway. However, it does pose some issues, in the occasion you need your fancy math on a non-white background.

Mellel 6.2 comes with the obvious solution - equations now get a transparent background. Now they can fit on any background color.

The transparent background gives us another advantage - dark mode support. We avoided giving equations the dark mode treatment (that is - drawing them with the colors reversed - white on black) because the white background of the equation would not translate to the same color as the page background, which caused an ugly frame to show up around the equation. With transparent background equations we can now safely reverse the colors and the results are very pleasing to the eye.

Improved Table of Contents

Mellel's tables of contents are beautiful, and you can customize them to the hilt - which is cool. When you export to PDF, the TOC page numbers serve as links to the corresponding section in the document - also cool. However, since only the page numbers in the PDF would respond to the click, it made them hard to target.

Mellel 6.2 brings a subtle but important improvement in that front. Instead of just the page number, the whole line is clickable. This not only makes the TOC links much more usable but also much easier to discover.

Mandaic Script Support

Great news to researches and scholars who wish to incorporate Mandaic texts into their Mellel documents. Mellel 6.2 now supports rendering Mandaic text correctly. This includes right-to-left ordering as well contextualizing - that is - using different letter forms depending on thier position in the word.

You can read all about Mellel 6.2 here.

Upgrading

Mellel 6.2 is a free upgrade to anyone who bought Mellel after December 2022; For customers who bought Mellel before that date the upgrade price is $44.99. Mac App Store customers can upgrade to the direct version under the same conditions. See our update guide for a step-by-step guide to upgrading.