Mellel2HTMLstructure: Export HTML from Mellel

Mellel2HTMLstructure is a droplet that extracts the structure of Mellel files and transforms it to html.

Before you try it, you might want to check the Philosophy of Mellel2HTMLstructure and the supported features and limits below.

This is work in progress, developed for my own needs. Some feature support is lacking or very basic at the moment.

Feedback is welcome. Speed of further development depends on my time off course and on the »motivation« coming from the community.

New in Version 1.1b

(9.3.2011)

New in Version 1.02b

(2.3.2011)

Installation and usage

Bugs

Yes. Most Probably.
Due to the nature of XML-transformation it is most likely that sooner or later strange results will occur with someone’s documents. Drop me a note if it happens. I’ll try what I can do to improve things.

Philosophy

Mellel (and for that matter any other word processor or publishing application) and html start from opposite layout assumptions: a static page vs a flexible flow. Therefor it makes not much sense to carry over the original formatting to html. Instead Mellel2HTMLstructure will focus on the structure of the text and leave the formatting of the html file to its own stylesheet.

Mellel2HTMLstructure depends on consequent use of auto-titles, proper nested lists and styles. So if your are more the manual formatting type of writer you’ll be out of luck with this Droplet (you might want to try Stephen Still's mellel2html.xsl instead). Mellel2HTMLstructure will not bring over any styling details (with a few exceptions).

I prefer a clean html code. Therefor Mellel2HTMLstructure tries to avoid any unnecessary elements. I hope I met the sweet spot ;-)

Supported features: Things that work (and how)

What’s not (yet) working

Those things will improve over time.

What’s not intended to work

For the curious

Mellel2HTMLstructure is basically an AppleScript droplet that performs some Terminal magic. Heart of the transformation is an xsl stylesheet.

An yes. This page was created with Mellel and Mellel2HTMLstructure.

Future plans