Redlex has released version 2.6 of Mellel
(http://www.mellel.com/), its word processor. The
company describes it as a “major update.”

“With Mac OS X 10.5 Apple introduced a wonderful
new feature called QuickLook, which allow you to
peep into documents without opening them,” says
Eyal Redler, RedleX’s CTO. “The default for word
processor documents, however, was only so-so: the
document was not divided into pages, elements
like footnotes were missing or misplaced, images
were not placed correctly or, in short, it did
not look like a PDF. We wanted our QuickLook
previews to look like a PDF.”

A Mellel document viewed with QuickView look
exactly like they would look in Mellel or in
print, he adds. In addition, to save time waiting
for the full preview, you can set in the
preferences the number of pages you wish to
preview.

Another new feature in Mellel 2.6 is the new
“Spread View.” Mellel now support viewing
documents in single page view, two page view,
four page view and ‘spread’ (facing pages
together).

Mellel 2.6 introduces many more features, including:

° Automatic update: Mellel now supports automatic
or manual updates. Mellel tells you when there is
an updates, tells you if it is a free update for
you, downloads it, installs it and runs Mellel
again.

° Better statistics: the statistics palette can
fine-tune what characters will not be included in
the count (e.g. punctuation or blank characters).

° You can save as PDF directly.

° Improved CJK: Mellel supports exporting and
importing Chinese, Japanese and Korean in several
encodings, which improves handling of older
documents in those languages.

° Smart style matching: with imported documents
or documents with ad-hoc attributes, Mellel will
smartly “sense” the attributes in the text and
match them. For example, if one applies a style
to text with font in boldface, Mellel will look
within the style for a style variation in
boldface.

° Windows Hebrew fonts: Mellel now displays vowel
marks with most Windows Hebrew fonts (in other OS
X apps those fonts are do not function with
Hebrew at all).

Mellel 2.6 is free to all registered users of
Mellel who’ve purchased Mellel after December
2006. Users who’ve purchased Mellel earlier can
purchase an upgrade for US$19.

Mellel 2.6 is available for download now. The
price for a single user license is $49, an
educational license is $35, a five-pack license
is $99. A boxed edition of Mellel is also
available for $64 (including shipping costs).

Mellel 2.6 is released with 13 localizations, in
addition to the English language version: Chinese
(new), Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Finnish (new),
French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese,
Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. Additional
localizations (e.g., Dutch, Greek) are expected
in the near future.