Mellel
Mellel is a professional word processor designed specifically for academics, scholars, scientists and technical writers. It excels at handling long and complex documents with advanced features including multilingual support, right-to-left text (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Syriac), structured outlining, multiple footnote and endnote streams, styles for any document element, and tight integration with reference managers like Bookends. Mellel is known for rock-solid stability, powerful find-and-replace tools, and precise control over formatting and layout, making it popular among those producing dissertations, technical papers, and scholarly manuscripts.
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1 suggestionMellel's developer publicly committed to shipping a native Apple Silicon build by the end of 2025, but that deadline appears to have passed without a release. The current version runs well under Rosetta 2 today, but Apple is removing Rosetta 2 in macOS 28 (late 2027), after which the Intel-only build will stop launching entirely. Contact Redlex (the developer) directly to ask for an updated timeline on the native build — this is time-sensitive with less than 18 months until the Rosetta deadline. In the meantime, monitor the Mellel website and check for updates periodically. If you need a word processor with confirmed native Apple Silicon support available now, Microsoft Word or Apple Pages are both mature alternatives, though they lack some of Mellel's specialised features for academic writing and multilingual documents.
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