There are a lot of great things about using a Mac, too many to count. But one thing that Mac software developers as a group don’t do well is right-to-left text editing.

TextEdit, the built-in lightweight text editor, handles right-to-left, pretty well actually, and it’s good for jotting things down, but isn’t up to formatting an essay or article. For that, you’re going to need something like Apple Pages or (deep breath) Microsoft Word.

Pages is fantastic, particularly if you’re using graphics in a document. Word on Mac is, and always has been, a Dog. Neither of them do right to left, which in Pages’ case is not a little bit odd, since it’s an Apple product and TextEdit does it fine.

So a market sprung up for serious word processors that could do right-to-left properly, Arabic and Hebrew being the main languages in question, and Hebrew being the one I use. Mellel is the pick of the bunch in my book. It doesn’t just do right-to-left. It does outstanding bibliographic integration, with apps like Bookends, cross-references, beautiful page layout and plenty more.

The learning curve is steep; this isn’t your grandpa’s word processor. It has a very heavy emphasis on the use of styles, so you don’t just format text on the fly, you choose a style for each piece of text, like Body, Heading, Sub-Heading etc. This is very powerful, but requires some setting up when you first start using the program. I can tell you that it’s very much worth pushing through this.

To help, there’s plenty of video guides and tutorials, as well as a thorough but gentle tutorial for beginners (direct link-PDF-6MB).

There are things that Mellel doesn’t do, some of which are a bit embarrassing, like no undos back past save and no flowing text around an image. But the user community is very active (often the case in a niche market, like here and here), and the developers are very open to incorporating feedback into their road map.

Mellel is on sale for an unspecified period.

PS I’m sorry to be so Mac-centric. I’d love to be able to offer advice on what Windows applications are useful for this kind of thing, but I’m just not up with it anymore. Regardless, Word 2007 for Windows does do right-to-left text editing (as it should), so that makes things a lot easier.

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