The "Atlantis" word processor will be on sale on bits, these next days, again, and here's what I wrote there on that very fine product of sw with so much of potential:

http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/atlantis-word-processor#comments76609

Taras, hello.

I have some suggestions and would be very pleased if you gave me an answer to them.

First of all, I would like to cite Manfred Kühn in full - this is not entirely "legal" from a purely formal-legal pov, but I'm absolutely sure that this (Kant) philosophy university professor I hold in deep respect would not be opposed to be cited here in this form, since he's fond of your word processor and hence would certainly like it to be "marketed" in the very best way it could.

From his blog (which is very insteresting in all possible respect for everybody who's interested in word processing and text creation (be it academic, literary or "just" "creating manuals, text books, whatever"):

http://takingnotenow.blogspot.be/2011/03/atlantis.html

"Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Atlantis
Since someone asked, Atlantis is a word processor which offers most of the standard features, but it is not bloated. If you need Tables or revision control, it is not for you. On the other hand, it offers "Save as eBook" which converts converts any document to the eBook format. Atlantis also saves to doc and docx. And it does outlining, styles, footnotes and endnotes. It also handles different languages well. In other words, Atlantis does everything I want out of a word processor.

Atlantis can be installed on a USB drive as a portable application.

Another plus: no ribbon to take usable space!

The standard registration fee is $35, i.e. a fraction of what you have to pay for the behemoth [he's speaking of MS Word here]. You can try before you buy.

I recommend it highly!"



Now:

- I am very pleased I can "purify" the layout, meaning, I can hide all those ugly (= ugly everywhere, in any program) toolbars, rulers and such.

- So many people have asked for tables, even years ago; let's face it, it's probably right what the professor says, if you really need tables, Atlantis probably isn't for you: Accepted; the same would go for pics and formulas (for the time being)

- Buyers should know that Atlantis, bought here or full-price, for the time being at least is always "life license"; in the past, I've bought other programs even after this very generous licensing detail was withheld; don't replicate my error there, but buy Atlantis here and now while you'll get your "lifetime" thing

- I literally hate MS Word (which I own) for being bloatware, but let's not fool ourselves: It's in such bloatware that "everybbdy" then finds his special wishes fulfilled if he's chancy, whilst in "simple, neat" offerings, this is not usually the case. This being said:

- Some people say Atlantis is able to smoothly handle documents with a large 3-digit page number, and even with more than 1,000 pages

- There seems to be one of the very best (and perhaps the very best, outright) outlining features of all text processors available today

- Now combine these two features, and you'll see that a very important, third, feature is missing from Atlantis: Ace outlining, AND ace ability to process very large documents - where's the cross- linking function that would be able to link (text or header) paragraphs to other paragraphs, elsewhere in that same document? For me, it seems to be perfectly logical to add such functionality, since it's exactly that function (non-literary) writers will crave for when writing, and the more extended their writings become (in "page count"), the more such cross-linking within such texts become absolutely necessary

- Here, don't fall into the trap some 2-pane outliner developers fell into: It's not sufficient that those cross-links are functional within the electronic text body: They will have to survive into the publishing stage. I.e. in Atlantis, there should be made available special links that will jump to other paragraphs (and there should be a function to jump back), AND those links should be in a form that then, afterwards, allows for replacing the link encoding with any necessary mark-up codes the dtp application in question (InDesign, but others, too) would need to process those cross-links on their turn

- Also, there should be some functionality that does this, with "live" numbering of paragraphs (as you know, many legal (and other) textbooks refer from "margin number 786" to "margin number 284", and such cross-links should survive any writing / editing (i.e. additions of paragraphs / "margins", deletions of such, and moves of such, and of course, by any number, i.e. if the author moves paragraphs 178 to 297 after paragraph 34 or paragraph 945, all those cross-links should remain perfectly functional

- I know I'm asking for something really elaborate here, but in view of the above, you're safe to expect to see your sales roare tenfold: Any scholar, worldwide (and not needing formulas, hence the utility to work about that, too), will happily switch to Atlantis then

- Ok, so much for mid-term wishes

- For the time being, in my trial, I missed a very useful feature that would be very easy to implement: Do I have your word you'll implement it rather soon? There is no keyboard shortcut for "apply the style heading 1/2/3/4" (and I think that will do, or do even "heading 5/6/7" - I'd be perfectly happy with 1/2/3) to the selected piece of text; I know I can assign styles by double-clicking within the styles list, but that's very cumbersome, as well as clicking on the dedicated symbol on the bottom of that list (to be displayed within the F6 "control board" - but that symbol is a little bit "illogical" if I dare say since whenever you click on it, it will NOT assign, to your selection, the style you will previously have selected within the styles list above, but that very styles list selection will have been reverted to the CURRENT style of the text selection in question, which renders that special symbol totally inefficient:

- There should be a symbol - and a kb shortkey to it!!! - that will apply, to any selection, THAT selected style within the styles list that you'd previously selected there... and without that style selection reverting to CURRENT style of your text selection, i.e. you would have to differenciate these: For one, ok, within the style list, always show the CURRENT style, BUT have an additional function/command/symbol/AND SHORTCUT applying the "previously assigned style"

- I also publish this comment on Atlantis in the outlinersoftware.com forum where I regularly publish my thinkings on text sw and on file management, before consolidating it all within my own, taxonomied web page:

http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5268/0/atlantis-review

- You can reach me by email, and I'd be happy to "give a conceptional hand" in your implementing the above, or any other elaborate, "smart" functionality

- I appreciate this site doesn't censor me if I'm critical of sw (in spite of the fact that my remarks then will certainly not push sales of the respective offering then), so I'm happy to encourage fellow "bitsters" to buy Atlantis, even in its current shape: At 16 bucks for a "lifetime", it's an absolute steal, and if Taras listens to my advice, this will soon become the very best text processor out there there is, even including those that are sold in the high 3-digit bucks range (and you will've got it for 16 dollars...)

To my first post there, the author responded (if I interpreted him correctly) that he wasn't sure he could do it. I very much hope he'll see that all that is between (him and Atlantis) and (his first dollar million) is very precisely that very last mile he will have to go, too - except for this feature, Atlantis is very powerful, much better than I had imagined, from its price and from its market "relevance" which both don't reflect the importance of that fine program.

http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/atlantis-word-processor#comments76674

I've done real-life trial with Atlantis in the meanwhile.

- Of course, shortkeys can be assigned to styles, it's done in "Format-Styles" - then select the style - then "Modify" - then "Hotkey". Sorry, my fault.

- Another potentially very helpful feature is "Multiple Selection" (Help file: "Editing Documents - Multiple Selection"); years ago, I encountered a Mac text processor which did that, but since I don't own a Mac, I had thought I had to live without that feature forever, and here it is: Splendid!

- Not only there is the above-mentioned outlining function, but also there is an INCREDIBLE POWERFUL paragraph NUMBERING function. It's rather complicated since it offers almost everything you never even thought of, and it's a little bit hidden; help file: "Formatting Documents - Bulleted & Numbered Lists" (! Here, you could assume it's the usual little lists functionality, oh no!) - then "Fundamentals", etc., and especially, "Style-Controlled Lists" - as said, it's incredible powerful, and it's worthwile to extensively play around some 2 hours with it.

And there is a "trick" to it which is not obvious but something worthwile mentioning. As above, "Format - Style" - choose the style and "Modify". Then, go to the "List" button of the "Edit Style" dialog which will appear, and there, default is "Level 1" - so you don't see this splendid feature. But change the selection to "Level 2" or below, and then an additional checkbox is displayed: "Restart after higher level".

Now this is set "on" by default, but the trick is to define another not-headings paragraph style as numbered here, let's say in the way (1), (2), etc., let's say on "level 6" or so, as "special numbered", or the other round, if you do legal papers, "format" your "Normal" = regular paragraph style this way, and have another one, "NN" for "not numbered", for regular text which is NOT to be numbered by paragraphs (add additional blocks of text to existing paragraphs (and which should not be numbered on their own, by separating them by shift-enter instead of enter) - again, the "Restart after higher level", here, exceptionally (this will be your only style where you do this), must be UN-checked.

The result, if you also "format" 3 or 4 levels of headings correctly (and every which way you choose), will be texts that go as follows (and you can indent, etc. as you like):

I - Header 1
A - Header level 2
1 - Another one, level 3
(1) a text paragraph
(a) Header level 4
(...)
(24) text paragraph (and choose "level 5 (or further down for them! because this way, their text begin will appear within the outline!!!)
(25) another text paragraph
II - Another header level 1
A - Level 2, again
1 - And level 3 again
(26) another text paragraph

and so on

University students are not allowed to do this, they must cite "(as seen in I - A - (1) - (a) (3))", but everybody else will simply refer as "(see (24))", and I don't have to tell (European) people in the legal professions (in the U.S., very strict other rules apply) how useful this "flow numbering" is - in Germany, they do whole books this style, with 1,600 such paragraphs, and then, even, an index referring to these, notwithstanding the proper "outline" of headers overlayed to this paragraph-instead-of-pages setup.

- So you see here that the foundations are very well there, this program has tremendous potential. And now for cross-referencing. I've found both the "Viewing Documents - Bookmark" and "Editing Documents - Hyperlinks" help file entries, but I don't see how we could do a live cross-reference with them, either in the style of "(See I - A - (1) - (a) (3))" or in the style of "(see (24))", let alone these references being then updated when we move paragraphs or whole sections, and updating is even necessary whenever we then add a new paragraph between the link target and the link pointer.

As I see it, Atlantis has everything that's needed for legal documents, in a much smoother application than that monstruous MS Word, but almost any lawyer today uses MS Word, since there (s)he gets the necessary cross-referencing. I personally think Atlantis, spiced-up with that function, would make an entry in law offices (and many, many offices in large corporations) like thunder.

It's the core functionality that will make explode Atlantis' sales.

(I know that live tables (You can always insert tables as images, and yes, I'm very aware that's not the same thing.) are quite important, but from a marketing pov, an application should build up on its real strengths, especially when such additional work there will open up a tremendously big market.)

Atlantis is my "go to" word processor. It just works.

Your extended review did point out something I did not know - the multiple selection.

Steve

Steve wrote:

Your extended review did point out something I did not know - the
multiple selection.

There's a similar feature in Word (up to v.2010) called the Spike http://helpdeskgeek.com/office-tips/use-the-spike-to-copy-and-paste-text-in-word/

It's not as flexible as Atlantis'. You can only use it to collect (cut) material from various locations and paste it altogether at one point.

1)

"You can only use it to collect (cut) material from various locations and paste it altogether at one point."

Well, that's good enough for many tasks, so this is a good hint! (I once heard of "multiple clipboard in Office", this must be one of its incarnations.)

2)

Steve, another real goodie (but perhaps you know already): It's possible to do multiple replace using placeholders. See below.

3)

Steve, on bits there are some (often earlier) posts in the same line, and which go: "I own Word (and others), but most of the time, it's Atlantis I use." - I think that's a good description, and which will certainly now apply to my use of word processors = output for "third parties", everything - between - letters and longer stuff, but then, for me, that'll be an "upgrade" since in the past, I used Word 9 for that purpose...

The developer doesn't seem to realize cross-referencing is important and must survive paper output (be it for Courts or otherwise); judging from the bits posts (first day though, so you'd expect many more than it gets!), there ain't that many people interested in this program, and people criticise it for not being free (today, and in the past).

4)

All the more so, a developer should target the professional market ("prof" without quotes here), but there, users will NOT "play around" the shortcomings (but use Word instead, for the time being).

I had some playing around with cr (cross-referencing). Since it's live, I did not expect the following set-up to work in every detail (and it doesn't in every detail):

- cr hint: £a, £b, etc (for bigger works, that would be £ab, £ac... or some, it's just important to NOT do 1, 2, 3 and then 10, 11... and then 100, 101... but perhaps start with 100, which gives you 899 possible cr's, without the risk to do a false 1 instead of 01, or a false 90 instead of 090 (see below) (for most projects, a list of 11...99 will probably do, and if you really need more, you always can replace the existing ££ and $$ by £0 and $0)
- cr target: $a, $b, etc (see above)
or any other special signs that will NOT occur in your text otherwise (e.g. the cent or the Yen sign, or the little 1, 2, 3, or the little a...)

Then have a sheet of paper (or some notepad tool or whatever) where you cross out every such number (you could print out such a list beforehand (Excel should create the list, then print it out as cvr, or is it crv?)))

Now my improbable idea was, what about File Locator Lite (which gives a hit table from which you could write down a concordance list
(4) $c
(9) $a
(27) $p)

for writing it all down from there when you're ready, and then look all "££" up, one after the other, and replace the number/char there manually (but not the £, see below) - that's not beautiful, but might be acceptable.

But as said, FLL will NOT show the (4), (9), (27)... (as I had feared).

So you must do it all manually in your word processor:

First, search for all $$, one by one, and write down your concordance table, manually: (4) = c, (9) = a, etc. (A screen print-out of what FLL might have brought should have avoided this step.)

Then, search for all ££, one by one, and do as said above: £c will become "£4)" and so on (see below).

5)

Then, Atlantis additional goodie comes into play:

First (no goodie here):

replace
£
by
(See margin number

Second:

replace
$?
by
(nothing, void, let the field empty I mean)
(here, click the option "use wildcards")

You will have remarked that this use of wildcards in global replace ONLY affects the search term, not the replace term, unfortunately, i.e. in First above, you cannot

replace
£?
by
(See margin number ?.)

which would be much better of course, but in the replace term, a "?" would simply replace the respective margin number, which is not what you want.

6)

In shorter papers, I have between 3 and 6 such cr's, and here, such manual fumbling remains acceptable, but you see why elaborate papers are written either in Word or in Latex or markup languages: the above is simply too much fuss.

7)

Btw, it cannot be automated by macroing since the respective margin / paragraph / subtitle number can't be fetched by the macro. The same applies to several outliners: In UR, e.g., it's not possible to fetch the cursor position, whilst it's even clearly indicated in the status line: The status line content in UR cannot be fetched.

Let alone the absence of a (live, or automatically updated) numbering system in ANY outliner I know, and from which you could then try to build a macro for cr.

Whilst all this is available in Word...

Btw, there's plenty of web findings to spice Word up in this respect, both with macros and with paid add-ins.

And btw, it's known that Word stability probs with respect to cr occur whenever you import pics, formulas and such too early (i.e. when your cr has not yet been done in full), and when you try to use citation managers together with it.

With macros, it's possible to enter the respective cr codes (hint and target) into Word, without using the respective Word dialogs. The question remains how a 1,000 page Word doc would react, in its later stages.

I did not yet investigate opening an Atlantis file (again, they are reputed to remain stable even when they grow very big, hence the interest for this) with an external rtf editor, and doing the above-mentioned task there, fully automated. In any case, once you'll have replaced your cr hints with "live" target indicators, they will become currupt if you then do changes within the same file, e.g. (correction of the above) additions or eliminations before any target in question.

1)

As you see from the above, manually doing cr's that survive into "print" is not easy; all the more so I'd be interested in knowing if it's possible to do such markup, e.g. in any outliner, and which then MS Word would be able to properly process.

I'm speaking of two variants here:

a)
- Do it all in your outliner.
- Then export to rtf, including all those and codes (in whatever form; whatever then Word could "read", would be ok).
- Then import it into Word, and Word would aa) translate it all into a proper Word file (perhaps with some additional macroing then, in order to translate some item indent codes into proper outlining again (if necessary, i.e. if that cannot be automated anyway, from a specific outliner to Word), AND bb) Word also being able to translate the above cr codes into its own; bb) almost certainly could be realized by some additional macroing if necessary; btw, here are some links:

http://word.mvps.org/ e.g. http://daiya.mvps.org/bookwordframes.htm
or http://www.word.mvps.org/Downloads/WordsNumberingExplainedUSLetter.pdf

http://word.tips.net/T008094_Combining_First_and_Second_Numbered_Levels_on_One_Paragraph.html

http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/complex_documents.htm

http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/numbering.htm

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/office-and-productivity-applications/0596004931/editing-power-tools/wordhks-chp-4-sect-18

http://www.editorium.com/dexter.htm (80 bucks)

http://www.editorium.com/IndexLinker.htm (50 bucks)

http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/word-annoyance-cross-referencing/

some books, "Word xyz for Law Firms" (are considered rather worthless, didn't check)

http://www.brainbell.com/tutorials/ms-office/Word/

http://www.kabesoftware.de/WordEasy.html (30€)

http://superuser.com/questions/626443/word-2010-how-to-create-a-macro-to-auto-insert-author-name-in-the-footer?rq=1

http://superuser.com/questions/222890/how-to-create-reusable-fields-in-word?rq=1

http://superuser.com/questions/532128/how-to-find-all-field-codes-in-word-documents?rq=1

http://superuser.com/questions/604138/word-2010-field-code-to-reference-2nd-level-of-outline-number-only?rq=1

http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/?page_id=1791 (Hierarchical headings in legal docs)

http://snapdone.com/snapnumbers/ (free, 20 bucks)

http://www.kabesoftware.de/MarginNumbers.html (40€)

http://pa-lawpracticemanagement.com/outline-numbering-in-word/

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/conditional_cross_references.htm = a whole and highly interesting zip package

http://www.ablebits.com/word-links-checker/ (8€)

and so on

b)
As above, but html instead of rtf, and then, from html to Word, and then macroing for translating the additional codes into the right Word ones

2)

You might ask, why put it into Word then, instead of direct transfer into InDesign or such?

a) Because so many publishing houses insist on the Word format (because the staff there doesn't know any better); then (in the best of cases) it's from Word to InDesign (and in the bad cases, from Word to print)

b) Because it's easy to produce high-quality pdf's from Word files, whilst InDesign e.g. is astonishingly worthless for this task

3)

There's lots of tools for "technical writing", and XML Editors, etc., like Adobe FrameMaker, Stylus Studio, Oxygen, Arbortext Editor and so on (and Latex, of course) - it seems that for serious academic writing, too, some of those might be best.

The irony here being that those begin in the high 3-digit dollar range, whilst Atlantis is 35 bucks, so you see what a treat Atlantis with cr would be even if the developer tripled its price on the occasion.

4)

As said above, some bitsters accuse Atlantis for not being free; they don't grasp that it has got a real nice outlining feature (even if you tell them) which largely justifies the price.

It would be of interest to muse about "Atlantis vs. 1-pane outliners" - where are the conceptual differences, or why would I be wrong if I said "Atlantis is one of the best 1-pane outliners there is"?

Thanks for all the postings and testing 22111. I've not had time to participate with much of anything due to the time of year here in the Midwest USA - winter. I'm a travel agent and this is my busiest time - and I'm thankful!

You make good points about the professional market. On the Atlantis WP forum it appears most are professional writers.

Another feature I like about Atlantis is the "Project."

Steve

Thank you so much, Steve! :-)

As for its forum, I hadn't even been aware of the existence of such, I had overlooked its list entry in its home page:

http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/forum.htm

As for the "project" feature, this would indeed become of interest in the context of using At as a 1-pane outliner (and then, having 5 or 6 such "outlines" loaded concurrently); btw, "1-pane", "2-pane", etc. are always to be strictly understood on the conceptual level (Atlantis, NoteMap, Bonsai all being 1-pane outliners, UR being 2-pane, Zoot or Normfall being 3-pane, and not by "let's count the available panes" which would artificially construct 8-pane outliners, of course).

I prefer conceiving the ultimate 3-pane outliner, instead of going back to the 1-pane concept, but it's more than helpful to acknowledge that the latter avoids any additional prob the 2- and 3-pane variety adds to the core functionality of "text processing" as we had been accustomed to by traditional "word processors" - it's all the more important to NOT leave such ease of text processing out of an "ultimate" outliner, as unfortunately do most current outliners (and as I have said, it's not a surprise that for that missing functionality alone, perhaps 99 p.c. or more pc users always use MS Word (or its free alternatives) instead of an outliner).

As for "writers" using At, no wonder: It's "light", AND it has got everything they need (except for screenwriting and writing for the stage (see below)), and the lack of cr-surviving-export-into-the-print-stage doesn't affect them.

As for special formatting, "Final Draft 9" is out... but then, if your output format is pdf, anyway, you can do many things with macros, in ANY word processor.

And here again I deviate: In the early days of pc'ing, macro functionality was implemented in almost every not-too-basic "consumer" sw, be it word processing, spreadsheets or db's (cf. even askSam's "programming language" of then, not speaking of "Freamwork" 's "Fred" scripting language). Then, with Windows, it all came down to the pure basics, everywhere, and now it's extremely rare that any applic comes with its own macro tool.

And digressing again: Ok, it's "sensible" to have one, global macro tool (e.g. AHK), instead of a dozen or so proprietary macro tools... but then, as said, INTERNAL macros are so much more elegant, since they avoid all "sleep, 200 milliseconds" and "wait for window with name xyz" elements external scripting has to (poorly and unreliably) depend upon.

And no, At does NOT have such an internal macro feature.

And yes, I acknowledge the prob of "live" numbering / cr'ing (and again, it's not present in ANY outliner of my knowledge!) - either, the prog has to do "global replace" again and again and again, and incl. for the cr'ing, not only for the numbering, or then, it "does it" in an external "concordance table" of any sort, text file, db, whatever, and then manual adding of cr'ing to internal numbering seems almost impossible.

Thus, any sw product will quickly find its "natural market", depending both on ease of use and "completeness for" that market in question, AND on missing features that withhold any entry in alternative markets... which had been my point here. ;-)

(Whilst MS Word "serves them all" - except for integrating IM...)