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Atlantis "Review"
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Posted by 22111
Jan 22, 2014 at 08:59 PM
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.
Posted by 22111
Jan 23, 2014 at 08:11 PM
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
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://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/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://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”?
Posted by Steve
Jan 27, 2014 at 02:08 PM
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
Posted by 22111
Jan 27, 2014 at 04:23 PM
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…)