School days: Mellel & Scrivener
It's that time of year again, academicians. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be highlighting products, tools and techniques to help students and teachers launch into the school year with style and ease. We pointed out Planbook last week, which should make lots of lesson planners happy; I'm going to cheer the hearts of language students with the news of an update to Mellel, the polyglot word processor for Mac, and also point to Scrivener, a powerful project management environment for writers in academic and creative settings.
As Mat mentioned back in March, Mellel is a word processor that keeps the needs of academic writers clearly in focus. First off, it's got the best language support I've ever seen, including full right-to-left script support; it even lets you write in Syriac, which makes my friend Adam extremely happy (he's a scholar of the medieval church, and apparently the correspondence of the day was generally carried out in Syriac -- nobody speaks it today). It's also got powerful style sheet and footnote/endnote tools rolled in, and last week's update to version 2.2.7 enhanced its outlining support with the addition of OPML import and export. At $35 for student licenses ($49 for general use) it's a steal.
A comment on Mat's post suggested Scrivener, which David also noted in February. While it's not a 'final format' word processor, it does provide something special: a complete idea management and organizational environment for writing, including a 'virtual corkboard' for gathering your ideas and a solid research bin for collecting source materials. The program suits those with a more improvisational or bouncy writing style, as you can quickly reorder your work from the corkboard or outline and keep revising the parts that still need more effort. For lightly-formatted writing, you can go straight from Scrivener; for more highly-styled work, the program serves as a nice front end for other tools like Mellel, Final Draft or Word. Like the student edition of Mellel, Scrivener is $35; both programs have demo versions available.
