Atlantis Word Processor Blog

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.8

2012-01-15T18:02:00.001-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.8 has been released.

This version of Atlantis Word Processor is a minor release with a number of important adjustments and improvements. Click here for details.

There are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

If you do not have Atlantis Word Processor on your computer yet, you can install this new version of Atlantis by running the latest setup file of Atlantis. Click here to download it.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.8 (beta)

2011-11-17T00:54:00.001-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.8 is now available for betatesting.

This version of Atlantis has a number of important adjustments and improvements.

You can find details on this new version of Atlantis on the Betatesting page.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.6

2011-04-15T13:44:00.001-04:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.6 has been released.

This version of Atlantis Word Processor is a micro-update with critical bug fixes to the "Open DOCX" module of Atlantis. Click here for details.

There are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

If you do not have Atlantis Word Processor on your computer yet, you can install this new version of Atlantis by running the latest setup file of Atlantis. Click here to download it.

Terminating support for the U3 platform

2011-03-24T15:06:00.002-04:00

As previously announced, the U3 technology is no longer supported in Atlantis. Starting from the release of Atlantis 1.6.5.5, there will be no more updates to the U3-smart version of Atlantis Word Processor. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Note that even so, you'll still be able to install the standard version of Atlantis Word Processor on any memory flash drive, and use it from there.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.5

2011-03-24T08:52:00.001-04:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.5 has been released.

This version of Atlantis Word Processor is a maintenance release with bug fixes and minor improvements. Click here for details.

There are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

If you do not have Atlantis Word Processor on your computer yet, you can install this new version of Atlantis by running the latest setup file of Atlantis. Click here to download it.

Micro-updates

2011-03-23T19:00:00.002-04:00

We are announcing a change to the way fixes and other minor changes to Atlantis Word Processor get delivered to our users. Previously all the fixes and minor changes had to wait for the next beta version of Atlantis, and then after a period of betatesting, were released as a part of a new public version of Atlantis. As a result, you sometimes had to wait for weeks, maybe months to see a problem fixed.

From now on, there will be no more waiting. A minor update will be released publicly as soon as a problem is encountered and fixed, or a new minor feature is implemented in Atlantis. In this way, fixes will be available within days, sometimes even within hours of being reported, simply by updating your copy of Atlantis in any available way.

Note that the "bigger" changes and features introduced in Atlantis will still be released as beta versions for testing before proper official release.

Celebrating 10 years of Atlantis Word Processor!

2011-02-25T08:57:00.002-05:00

Ten years ago, February 25 2001, Atlantis Word Processor 1.0 was released.

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – our users and our betatesters, those who are with us since the beginning and those who only recently joined the Atlantis community. We want to thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. Without you we would not be where we are now.

We are celebrating the 10th anniversary with a discount on the Atlantis registration fee.
If you have not registered your copy of Atlantis yet, you can now do this with a $10 discount. The reduced price will be available until the end of February 2011.
So hurry up to register your copy of Atlantis Word Processor.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.4

2011-02-23T10:46:00.002-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.4 is available as a public release.

This version of Atlantis introduces a new Navigation tool. It also includes a number of important fixes and improvements. Click here for details.

There are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

If you do not have Atlantis Word Processor on your computer yet, you can install this new version of Atlantis by running the latest setup file of Atlantis. Click here to download it.

Adding phrases to the spellchecker dictionary

2011-02-08T15:43:00.003-05:00

Most spellcheckers do a reasonably good job of detecting individual misspellings. But when it comes to checking full phrases, spellcheckers do not perform so well, including those found in top-end word processors.

Let's take a real life example.

Let's suppose that you regularly use popular Latin proverbs like "corruptio optimi pessima" (this is a Latin phrase meaning "the corruption of the best is the worst"). If you type this phrase in Atlantis, the spellchecker will red-underline all three words separately:

This is because none of them is present in the Atlantis spellchecker dictionary.

Now if you regularly insert this proverb in your texts, you won't like to see it systematically flagged as a misspelling. You have two ways to go about this.

The first solution will work with any spellchecker (including that of Atlantis). You simply add all the individual words from the phrase to the spellchecker dictionary ("corruptio", "optimi", and "pessima" in our example). In Atlantis, this is done by right-clicking the red-underlined words one after the other, and choosing "Add to Dictionary" from the context menu:

When all three words have been added, Atlantis will not report "corruptio optimi pessima" as a misspelling.

But there are drawbacks to this method. All the words that you add to the dictionary ("corruptio", "optimi", and "pessima" in our example) are treated by the Atlantis spellchecker as proper single words. They are not reported as misspelt if you use them separately. This can have undesirable consequences: if you mistype "corruption" as "corruptio", it might very well be a typo, but the Atlantis spellchecker will not notice because both "corruption" and "corruptio" are now in the spellchecker dictionary. And there is even worse. Atlantis might very well suggest any of these Latin words as possible replacements for misspellings that you make. These suggestions will probably be inappropriate most of the time.

So Atlantis offers you a much better solution with none of the above drawbacks. Instead of adding each word making up a phrase, —one after the other—, you can add the entire phrase to the Atlantis spellchecker dictionary at one go: simply right-click the first of the red-underlined words, and choose "Edit Dictionary..." from the context menu:

Then type or paste the phrase in the "Words" edit box:

Click "Add". "OK" out of the dialog.

From then on, Atlantis will not report the phrase "corruptio optimi pessima" as a misspelling. However, if you type any of these components separately (either "corruptio", or "optimi", or "pessima"), each will be reported as a possible misspelling (they will be red-underlined).

More ways to follow us

2011-02-06T08:48:00.001-05:00

From now on you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Follow our tweets and the Facebook page to get our news, as they happen.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.4 (beta)

2011-01-22T05:40:00.000-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.4 is now available for betatesting.

Atlantis 1.6.5.4 is a maintenance release with a number of important fixes and improvements. It also includes a new Navigation tool.

You can find details on this new version of Atlantis on the Betatesting page.

U3: rather dead than alive

2010-11-29T12:57:00.002-05:00

Microsoft Windows, the world's most popular operating system, has turned 25 this month. A quarter of a century has passed since the release of Microsoft Windows 1.0.

25 years is not much for a human being. But for a software, it is a quite impressive age.

Regrettably not every software project is that long-lived.

As you probably know, we have been offering a special portable version of Atlantis for U3-smart memory flash drives since 2007. Initially, the U3 technology looked quite promising. But, sadly, it does not show signs of life any more. The official site of the U3 technology, u3.com, has been a nearly dead link for months now. Visitors to "u3.com" are automatically redirected to a site completely unrelated to the U3 technology and which is still "under construction". Not the brightest prospects for the U3 project it seems...

Understandably, the developers of Atlantis Word Processor cannot keep supporting a technology already abandoned by its own creators.

We will keep releasing updates to the U3-smart version of Atlantis until mid-2011. Existing owners of U3-smart Atlantis will be able to pick up these final updates through the "Help | Check for Updates..." command of Atlantis. Then, we will stop offering the U3-smart version of Atlantis Word Processor altogether.

But, please, do not worry. Atlantis Word Processor still remains a fully portable application that you can install on any memory flash drive. Only Atlantis Word Processor will no longer support the discontinued U3 technology.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.3

2010-11-26T12:36:00.002-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.3 is available as a public release.

This version of Atlantis introduces a new document viewing option "Hide White Space". Click here for details.

There are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

If you do not have Atlantis Word Processor on your computer yet, you can install this new version of Atlantis by running the latest setup file of Atlantis. Click here to download it.

Getting rid of section breaks, but not section formatting

2010-11-25T06:52:00.003-05:00

Sections are a powerful mechanism to compose documents with complex page layouts. Formatting options like page margins, page orientation, note numbering, etc, which are normally document-wide, can be particularized for individual document fragments if you include these within specific sections.

Now at times you might want to do just the reverse operation, i.e. merge several sections into one. Most of the time, it will be because you want these sections to share a common format.

The simplest, and to many, the most obvious way to merge two neighbouring sections is by deleting the section break separating them:

Note that section breaks are special symbols displaying in Atlantis only when the "View | Special Symbols" mode is on.

Section breaks can be deleted like any other character in a document. You only need to click before the section break symbol, then press the Del key. This will merge the section above the section break with the section following it.

But then you might have some issues with the formatting properties found in the resulting section. This is because in such cases Atlantis automatically decides which of the two original sets of formatting properties is assigned to the merged section.

So now and again you will want to change this default behavior and tell Atlantis which of the two original sets of formatting properties you want to be used for the resulting section. This is done through the Sections panel of the Atlantis Control Board. Here is how to proceed:

First, click anywhere in the section whose formatting you no longer care to preserve. It will automatically become the "current" section for Atlantis.

Then make sure that the Atlantis Control Board is displaying (check the "View | Control Board" menu command or press F6 if necessary). Then click the "Sections" button at the top of the Control Board to display the Sections panel:

Two scenarios are possible here.

A. If you want the current section to be merged into the preceding section, click "Merge highlighted and previous section" at the bottom of the Sections panel:

The current and the preceding section will become one, using the formatting properties of the section that was originally placed before the section break.

B. If you want the current section to be merged into the next section, click "Merge highlighted and next section" at the bottom of the Sections panel:

The current and the next section will become one, using the formatting properties of the section that was originally placed after the section break.

Note that, in both cases, merging the two sections of course entails automatic removal of the section break that separates them.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.3 (beta)

2010-10-12T21:06:00.003-04:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.3 is now available for betatesting.

Atlantis 1.6.5.3 is a minor release with a new document viewing option "Hide white space". When a document is in the Print Layout view mode, you can now save screen space by hiding the blank areas at the top and bottom of each page, and the space between the pages.

You can find details on this new version of Atlantis on the Betatesting page.

Snap to

2010-10-05T05:15:00.005-04:00

Any Windows software may display child windows called modal dialogs. A modal dialog requires users to interact with it before they can return to other windows of the parent application.

Most modal dialogs can be closed by clicking either the "OK" or "Cancel" button:

Other modal dialogs have different buttons. A click on these buttons also closes the associated modal dialog. The most common captions for such buttons are "Yes" and "No":

But other captions may be also used, like "Retry", "Ignore", "Open", "Save", etc.

Most of these modal dialogs traditionally have a default button invoking the most common action of the dialog. Default buttons are automatically highlighted with a special border. Its look depends on your Windows version and theme:

The default button in a modal dialog (the button highlighted with a special border) can be "clicked" by pressing the Enter key. Since the default button in a modal dialog is normally a button that is most often clicked in that dialog, "clicking" the default button with a press to the Enter key is a fast and convenient way to close the dialog.

Now if you use the mouse preferentially to deal with the modal dialogs, you might wish to enable a special option available on the "Pointer Options" tab of the "Mouse" applet of the Windows Control Panel:

This option is off by default in Windows. But if you enable it, you will notice a change in the behavior of the mouse pointer in modal dialogs, including the standard dialogs of Windows itself: as you open modal dialogs, you'll see your mouse pointer jump to the default button as if by magic! In this way, you only need to give a click to close the dialog and validate your choices:

Note that not all applications support this "Automatically move pointer to the default button in a dialog box" option of Windows. Atlantis Word Processor supports this option starting from version 1.6.5.2.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.2

2010-09-24T12:20:00.001-04:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.2 is available as a public release.

You can find the complete list of new features and changes in this version of Atlantis by clicking here.

There are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

If you do not have Atlantis Word Processor on your computer yet, you can install this new version of Atlantis by running the latest setup file of Atlantis. Click here to download it.

Tweaking ePubs (5): Make it quick with a right-click

2010-09-21T12:36:00.004-04:00

Making minor changes to existing EPUB files is easy with our free tweak_epub utility. You just launch the utility, direct it to an EPUB file of interest, and make desired changes.

If you need to modify EPUB files only occasionally, launching the utility manually, then browsing your disks for the EPUB file of interest could not be a problem. But if you need to edit many EPUB files, getting through this procedure for each EPUB file might be tiring.

So we have slightly modified the tweak_epub utility to make it more practical. You can now use the Windows Explorer "Open With" right-click command to open any EPUB file straightaway in the tweak_epub utility. This will be particularly useful if you often tweak EPUB files.

So how do you go about this?

1) First, click the following link to re-download the utility:

http://www.AtlantisWordProcessor.com/download/tweak_epub.exe

As before, you can download to any folder on your hard disk, and the utility still does not require installation. To run the utility, simply run the downloaded "tweak_epub.exe" file.

2) Right-click an EPUB file of interest in Windows Explorer.

3) Choose the "Open With..." command from the menu if it is available:

Otherwise, click the "Choose Program..." command:

4) Press the "Browse..." button in the "Open With" dialog:

5) Direct the "Open With..." dialog to the disk folder where you downloaded the tweak_epub utility, and double-click the "tweak_epub.exe" file:

6) Press the OK button in the "Open With" dialog:

From then on, Windows will show the "tweak_epub" command in the "Open With" menu whenever you right-click an EPUB file for editing:

Choosing the "tweak_epub" command will immediately open the selected EPUB file in "Tweak EPUB":

Heading-less chapters (2)

2010-07-22T14:30:00.004-04:00

When Atlantis saves a document as eBook, it divides it into chapters according to the Heading paragraphs found in that document. Each paragraph formatted as a Heading paragraph in the source document is interpreted as signaling a new chapter in the book.

Now quite often the first Heading paragraph of a source document is preceded by the book title, a cover picture, and at times by some other text. These are not actually part of any chapter of the book. For example, in the following screen capture, first a cover picture, then the book title ("Rembrandt Biography") and the author’s name ("by John Johnson") precede the first heading ("Childhood"):

When you save this document as eBook in Atlantis, any text preceding the "Childhood" heading is normally saved as a separate first chapter of the eBook. Accordingly, Atlantis will automatically include a corresponding item in the eBook Table Of Contents. This extra item is always named by Atlantis as the eBook "Title page":

Clicking this "Title page" item in the Table Of Contents of an eBook always brings the reader to the first page of the eBook.

Until now there was no way to have a different name for that automatic eBook chapter. Atlantis always used "Title page" as an automatic hard-coded name. But you might prefer a different name. Or if you are writing a book in a language other than English, you might need that automatic item in the table of contents to be named according to that other language. This is easily done using the latest beta version of Atlantis Word Processor and its support for heading-less chapters. Through this new feature of the Save as eBook command of Atlantis, you can now easily instruct Atlantis to use a different name for the initial heading-less chapter of your eBook.

Here are step-by-step instructions:

1) In Atlantis, press Ctrl+Home to place the caret at the beginning of the source document, then press Enter to create a new blank paragraph at the beginning of the document.

2) Choose the "Heading 1" style from the "Style" toolbar box of Atlantis to associate the first paragraph in the document with the "Heading 1" style:

3) Type the desired title for the initial chapter of your book within that first paragraph (for example, type "Cover Page"):

4) Select the first paragraph of the document with the keyboard or mouse (the fastest way to select a paragraph is by triple-clicking it):

5) Choose the "Format | Font..." menu command of Atlantis. Then check the "Strikeout" box:

and OK out of the dialog. The first paragraph in the document will display with strikeout:

This is how you can tell Atlantis that the "Cover Page" heading text from the source document should not be included in the eBook text when you save this document as eBook. On the other hand, the eBook Table Of Contents will automatically include a first item with a "Cover Page" caption (actually the text struck out at the beginning of the source document):

Sticking with JPEG

2010-07-15T14:21:00.002-04:00

In Atlantis, documents can include both text and pictures. Pictures can be inserted in two ways:

You can use the Atlantis "Insert | Picture..." menu command and direct Atlantis to graphic files (GIF, PNG, JPEG, etc) located on your hard drive.
You can also first copy a picture onto the Windows clipboard from some other application or from another document open in Atlantis itself, then paste the clipboard picture into the target document.

Now you might be curious as to how Atlantis stores pictures in documents, and rightly so, because it has practical implications.

When you save a document containing pictures in Atlantis, these are stored in the document file in either the PNG or JPEG format. It is very much like embedding PNG or JPEG graphic files directly into the document file. And when you close a document, then reopen it, the graphic format of each picture is retained within the document file as previously saved. If a document contains a picture in the JPEG format, Atlantis sticks with the JPEG format for that picture when you resave the document. Same thing for pictures found in the PNG format.

Even so, in practice Atlantis stores most pictures in documents in the PNG format. Pictures are stored as JPEG only when JPEG was their original format.

Atlantis offers no way to find out if the pictures included in a document are actually PNG or JPEG. This is because in most cases it is irrelevant which of the graphic formats is actually used by Atlantis to store a given picture within a document file.

But it is still possible to say which of the two graphic formats will be used by Atlantis to store a picture within a document:

If you paste a picture from the Windows clipboard, most probably it will be stored by Atlantis in the PNG format.
If you insert a picture through the "Insert | Picture..." menu command, it will be stored by Atlantis in the JPEG format if the graphic file that you insert is originally of the JPEG format.
For graphic files of any other supported format than JPEG that you insert through the "Insert | Picture..." menu command, Atlantis will systematically use the PNG format.

Again, most chances are that an inserted picture will be stored by Atlantis in the PNG format.

But at times you might want to force Atlantis to store a given picture in the JPEG format instead. There is only one way to do this: have this picture in the JPEG format on your hard drive and use the Atlantis "Insert | Picture..." menu command to insert it.

You might ask, why would I want to force Atlantis to store pictures in the JPEG format?

If your picture is a "color-rich" painting or photo, it normally takes much less disk space if stored as JPEG. Converting a JPEG photo to the PNG format, nearly always leads to a much bigger PNG file. So if you have graphic files in the JPEG format on your disk, it is preferable to insert them AS IS through the Atlantis "Insert | Picture..." menu command. Most likely, this will create a more compact document file.

This remark holds for eBooks too. If you save a document as eBook in Atlantis, pictures stored as JPEGs within the source document file will be saved as JPEGs too in the eBook file. This might also significantly reduce the global size of the eBook file.

So if you designed a rich-color cover picture for an eBook in a graphic software, we recommend that you do not copy/paste the picture from the graphic software into an Atlantis document. It is because your cover picture will most probably be inserted into the document in the PNG format.

Instead, save the cover picture to your disk in the JPEG format from your graphic software. Then use the Atlantis "Insert | Picture..." menu command to insert the saved JPEG file into a document in Atlantis. If you then save the document as eBook in Atlantis, the cover picture will be stored within the eBook file as JPEG. Your EPUB file will only be lighter.

Heading-less chapters

2010-07-06T05:59:00.004-04:00

If you are using Atlantis Word Processor to create eBooks, you certainly know that the eBooks created from Atlantis in the EPUB format customarily display with a "standalone" table of contents (or "navigation center") allowing readers to switch between chapters:

Adding items to these tables of contents is extremely easy in Atlantis. All you need to do is to format the chapter headings with the "Heading 1" style in the source document. When it creates a table of contents for an eBook, Atlantis automatically creates links (actually hyperlinks) to all the Heading style paragraphs present in the book.

This is OK for most ordinary purposes, but at times you might want a heading-less chapter from the source document to be included in the eBook table of contents. This might be the case, for example, with the copyright notice. Here is an example:

Click here to download a sample RTF document with the above copyright notice.

If you save this sample document as eBook in the current official version of Atlantis, the copyright notice will be kept in the eBook text, but the eBook table of contents itself won't include any link to the copyright notice. Because this notice is not preceded by a Heading style paragraph in the source document, Atlantis does not treat it as a separate book chapter and does not include it in the eBook TOC (Table Of Contents).

So if you wanted Atlantis to include a link to the copyright notice in the corresponding eBook TOC, you normally would have to turn the copyright notice into a separate chapter, and insert a Heading style paragraph before the notice. The text of that paragraph would automatically appear in the eBook TOC as a link to the copyright notice.

However, most authors will probably find it inappropriate to have big Heading titles heralding simple copyright notices in their eBooks. We have looked into this problem, and the next release of Atlantis Word Processor will offer a convenient and intuitive way to create TOC hyperlinks to heading-less chapters present in eBooks.

Here is how this will be done:

1) Create an ordinary Heading style paragraph right before the target text (in our example, right before the copyright notice). Type any suitable text (the text that you want included as hyperlink in the eBook TOC):

2) Select that heading text:

3) Choose the "Format | Font..." menu command, check the "Strikeout" box, and click OK:

This will apply the "strikeout" formatting to the heading:

Click here if you want to download a modified sample RTF document with the copyright notice preceded by a "struck-out" heading.

This is all you'll need to do! The "Copyright" Heading text (and corresponding hyperlink) will automatically be present in the eBook table of contents, but the Heading itself will not appear on the related eBook page:

So by formatting Headings in the source document with "strikeout" before saving it to the EPUB format, you will instruct Atlantis to exclude these "struck-out" Headings from the eBook text, but still use them to build the eBook table of contents itself.

This "strikeout" method will come in handy to include elements such as "Front Cover", "Title page", "Copyright", "Dedication" in the eBook TOCs, without promoting them to full-fledged Heading paragraphs on the eBook pages themselves.

Support for heading-less chapters in eBooks has already been included in the latest beta version of Atlantis. You can download it from the Betatesting page of the Atlantis Word Processor site.

Fallback fonts in EPUBs

2010-06-29T14:50:00.003-04:00

When you save a document as eBook in Atlantis, information about the fonts used to format the document text is saved to the eBook file. Accordingly, and for example, an eBook saved from a document formatted with "Times New Roman" will include a similar indication in its file. This is how eBook readers know which fonts they should use for the display of each eBook.

That sounds fine in theory, but in real life eBook readers will rarely display your eBooks with the fonts used in the original documents. This is because the required fonts are not always available on the eBook readers. So for example if "Calibri" was specified as the font to be used for the display of one of your eBooks, and the eBook reader does not have this font, it will have no choice but to display the eBook text with one of its default fonts. In such cases, your eBook might display quite differently from what your original intention was.

The first solution that comes to mind is to include all the required fonts in the eBook files, i.e. embed the fonts in the eBooks. Atlantis can easily embed fonts in eBooks – there is a dedicated option in the Atlantis "Save as eBook" window:

Unfortunately, embedding fonts not only makes the eBook files much bigger but also does not guarantee that the eBooks will display in the intended way in all eBook readers. This is because a few eBook readers (including the iPad) do not support font embedding. No matter how many fonts you embed in your eBook files, they will not be used by these eBook readers.

There is no perfect solution to this problem. But a partial solution is still possible. It will make your eBooks display closer to the original look on the various eBook readers: the next maintenance release of Atlantis – 1.6.5.2 – will not only save the original font names to the eBook files but it will also include information about the corresponding generic font families. In practical terms, the following keywords will be associated with the font names, depending on which family they belong to: serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy, or monospace. In this way, the eBook readers will be able to choose the closest substitutes from the available fonts.

This change has already been included in the latest beta version of Atlantis Word Processor.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.2 (beta)

2010-06-23T08:35:00.001-04:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.2 is now available for betatesting.

Atlantis 1.6.5.2 is a maintenance release with minor changes and fixes.

You can find details on this new version of Atlantis on the Betatesting page.

New EPUB logo

2010-06-18T16:19:00.003-04:00

The EPUB format in which Atlantis Word Processor creates eBooks, is steadily becoming the eBook industry de facto standard. The position of the EPUB format recently strengthened even further with the release of the bestselling tablet computer iPad which also supports this eBook format.

But even then, and as surprising as it might sound, the EPUB format had no official logo until now.

So, IDPF, the creators of the EPUB format, recently announced an EPUB logo contest. Anyone could enter the competition, and suggest a logo.

The contest is now closed, and the winner is Ralph Burkhardt from Germany. Here is his suggested logo, now adopted as the official logo of the EPUB format. We find it quite nice. What do you think?

iPads and breaking pages for sure

2010-06-04T18:17:00.004-04:00

If you read our recent blog post about page breaks in eBooks, you know how to make sure that your eBooks have page breaks at the desired locations. All you need to do is to add manual page breaks at the appropriate locations in your source documents in Atlantis before saving them as EPUB files.

Now whenever you save a document as eBook in Atlantis, the manual page breaks in that document are saved to the corresponding eBook file using the "page-break-before: always" CSS attribute.

Until recently, this CSS attribute was supported and correctly rendered by all major eBook readers. In this way, all eBooks created in Atlantis displayed correctly in eBook readers: the page breaks present in the original documents were also present in the corresponding eBooks when viewed in the current eBook readers.

But as you know, a new tablet computer from Apple – the iPad – has recently hit the markets. iPads can be used as eBook readers. Now it so happens that iPads do not create page breaks in the text flow when they encounter a "page-break-before: always" CSS attribute. So as things stand, your eBooks will most likely display as a continuous flow of text on the iPads even if you designed them to have page breaks between their "chapters", for example.

To solve this conundrum, the next release of Atlantis Word Processor will save page breaks to eBooks differently, i.e. in a way supported by all major eBook readers, including the iPad. Atlantis will create a new XHTML file within the eBook package whenever it finds a page break in the original document. This is because all eBook readers automatically display a page break between neighboring XHTML files found in EPUB packages. There will be more XHTML files within the EPUB packages created by Atlantis, but the page breaks saved to EPUBs in this way will be displayed as such by all eBook readers, irrespective of whether they support or don't support the "page-break-before: always" CSS attribute.

To sum up, all you'll have to do in order to have page breaks saved in this new way in your eBooks, will be to save or resave your original documents as eBooks in any next version of Atlantis.

Look-alikes

2010-05-21T19:55:00.003-04:00

We quite often feel the need to emphasize specific fragments of documents in order to draw the reader's attention to them. To achieve this, we format them in a special way so that they stand out from the rest of the text:

In this particular example, the "extra formatting" of the word "immediately" includes bold, red font color, and underline. Applying such a formatting to a selection of text is as easy as ABC. There are multiple ways to do so in Atlantis: you can use the "Format | Font..." menu command, various font formatting toolbar buttons, keyboard shortcuts, the Format Palette of Atlantis, etc. No doubt you are familiar with these methods.

Now let's suppose that we want to emphasize a different text fragment in the same way. Let's suppose that we have the following text and want to format "Your site will be banned" in the same way as "immediately":

Of course, we can repeat all the actions that we performed to format the word "immediately".

But things can be a lot easier in Atlantis: we can use special copy/paste commands.

As you know, Windows includes a temporary storage place for clips of data, namely the Windows Clipboard. All applications, including Atlantis, can place fragments of document onto this clipboard, so that they can be retrieved at a later time and pasted into a different location. This is the standard copy/paste operation.

On top of that, Atlantis has a special proprietary clipboard called the Font Format Clipboard. It works just like the standard Windows Clipboard, except that it stores font formatting properties instead of text fragments.

Here is how it works.

First, let's click within the word whose formatting we want to clone (the word "immediately" in our example):

Then we can press the "Copy font format" toolbar button, or hit the associated hot key (Ctrl+Shift+C). Atlantis will automatically place the font formatting properties found at the current cursor location (i.e. the font formatting of the word "immediately") onto its Font Format Clipboard.

Of course, as you would expect, there is a corresponding "Paste font format" command.

We must first select the target text fragment:

Then we can press the "Paste font format" toolbar button, or hit the associated hot key (Ctrl+Shift+V). Atlantis will automatically apply all the font formatting found on its special font format clipboard to the selected text:

Deselecting text by clicking anywhere in the document let's us see that both text fragments ("immediately" and "Your site will be banned") are now formatted identically:

The font formatting stored on this special clipboard remains available until you change it. In this way, you can apply identical font format to as many text fragments as you wish. Simply select a target fragment, and use the "Paste font format" command of Atlantis.

You can even apply formatting to multiple text fragments at one go. First, select them as a multiple selection:

Then press the "Paste font format" toolbar button, or hit Ctrl+Shift+V. They will all be reformatted in the same way:

Portable fonts

2010-05-14T19:22:00.002-04:00

As you know, Atlantis ranks as one of the most portable word processors available: you can easily install Atlantis with your favorite settings to a memory flash drive and Atlantis will travel with you wherever you go.

Atlantis will work just as smoothly whether it is run from a hard drive or a flash drive.

However, you might experience minor inconveniences related to fonts when you run Atlantis from a plugged-in flash drive. The host system might miss some of the fonts that you commonly use to format your documents, and Atlantis will not be able to format, display or print correctly any document using those "missing fonts".

No need to worry though: the next release of Atlantis will introduce a solution for such font-related problems in portable copies of Atlantis.

All you will have to do is to place the files of your favorite fonts in the home folder of Atlantis on the flash drive: no matter how "un-common" these fonts will be, Atlantis will be able to use them even if they are missing from the host system.

Here is exactly how things will work.

First, you will have to copy the desired TrueType font files from your hard disk to the home folder of Atlantis on the flash drive. Font files are normally stored on your hard disk under the "C:\Windows\Fonts" folder, and TrueType font files have either the .ttf, .otf, or .ttc file extension. The home folder of Atlantis is where the main executable file of Atlantis (Atlantis.exe) is stored. The font files can be placed directly in the root of the Atlantis home folder on the flash drive, or in a dedicated "Fonts" subfolder.

Then, when you launch Atlantis from the flash drive, it will automatically scan for font files under its home folder (including subfolders), and will temporarily load the fonts into the memory of the host system. All the loaded fonts will immediately be available in Atlantis, and in any other application that you run on the host system. Note that these fonts are loaded only temporarily into the memory of the host system: they are unloaded from it as soon as you close the portable instance of Atlantis.

The U3-smart portable version of Atlantis will also support font loading from a flash drive. But since the home folder of Atlantis on U3-smart drives is normally hidden, you will have to place the fonts files in the "Documents" folder of the U3-smart drive.

So Atlantis will not only travel with your favorite settings, it will also travel with your favorite fonts. As usual with Atlantis, you will have the best of all possible worlds! :)

Fonts, fonts, fonts

2010-05-04T09:58:00.009-04:00

Unlike plain text editors, word processors allow you to format text with different font faces (or simply fonts). This is such a basic procedure that even complete newbies very quickly learn what "Arial" or "Times New Roman" are and how to apply them to text.

But to a lot of users, managing "fonts" is still an unclear business.

First, how do you know which fonts are currently available in Atlantis?

You can either press Ctrl+Shift+F or use the mouse to open the "Font" toolbar drop-down. Or you can open the "Format | Font…" dialog (Ctrl+D). You then get a complete listing of the fonts that you can use to format text in Atlantis.

Now Atlantis users periodically ask "How do I add fonts to Atlantis?”

This is an easy one: you don't!

You add fonts to your Windows system, not to Atlantis.

Atlantis does not have its own collection of fonts. Atlantis simply supports all the "TrueType" fonts available on your Windows system.

If you want to add fonts to your system, you first need to go to the Windows Control Panel and display the "Fonts" applet (click here if you do not know how to access the Windows Control Panel). This will give you a complete list of the fonts installed on your system. For word processing purposes, you are only interested in the fonts that are tagged with the "(TrueType)" caption. These will either have a "TT" or "O" icon ("TT" stands for "TrueType", and "O" for "OpenType" but they all actually belong to the "TrueType" category):

The TrueType fonts available on your system are actually special files with the ".ttf" extension (for example, the file for "Times New Roman" is named "TIMES.TTF").

Of course, to add (install) new fonts to your system, you need to have the corresponding files on your computer hard drive. ".ttf" files are often stored within ".zip" files. You need to uncompress them to one of your disks. Font files, both free and paying, can be found on the Web (you'll find links to sites with free downloadable fonts on the Useful Links page of the Atlantis site).

The procedure is then straightforward.

Choose the "File | Install New Font..." menu command in the "Fonts" applet of the Windows Control Panel:

Use the "Folders" and "Drives" boxes of the "Add fonts" dialog to navigate to the folder where you have stored the ".ttf" files that you want to install. Windows will give you a listing of the fonts it found:

Click the "Select All" button:

and OK out of the "Add fonts" dialog.

The newly installed fonts will immediately appear among the available fonts in Atlantis. You do not even need to close and restart a running instance of Atlantis. Atlantis is automatically informed by Windows about any newly available fonts, and Atlantis picks them up just as automatically. The new fonts are visible in the various font lists of Atlantis:

So after installing new fonts on your Windows system, you can immediately start using them to format your documents in Atlantis.

Now you might never add fonts to your system and stick with the standard set of fonts shipped with your version of Windows. But even then, the likelihood is that you will use only a fraction of all the available fonts to format your texts in Atlantis. Albeit unwittingly, you will have "favorite" fonts. There is just one small snag here. Your "favorite fonts" will be scattered throughout the alphabetically-sorted complete list of all available fonts. That list will often be overlong, and selecting the desired font from that list will inevitably be awkward and time-consuming.

But don't despair! Atlantis offers a most practical solution to this problem: you can tell Atlantis which of the available fonts are your favorites. They will then be included in a shortlist of your favorite fonts.

Here is how to proceed:

1) Choose the "Tools | Options..." menu command of Atlantis, and click the "My Favorite Fonts..." button on the "General" tab:

This will display the "Favorite Fonts" dialog. By default, it includes three "favorite" fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana:

2) To remove a font from that list of Favorite Fonts, click to select it, then press the "Delete" button:

To remove all fonts from the list of Favorite Fonts, press the "Delete All" button instead:

3) To add a new font to your Favorite Fonts, pull down the list of all installed fonts (click the down arrow to the right of the topmost box in the "Favorite Fonts" window):

Click to select a font of interest:

Then press the "Add" button:

The new font will appear among the Favorite Fonts:

Of course, to register your changes to the Favorite Fonts you need to OK out of the "Favorite Fonts" dialog:

Now you might ask "how will my Favorite Fonts be displayed in Atlantis?"

By default, your Favorite Fonts will be systematically displayed at the top of the Atlantis font lists:

This obviously makes it easier for you to select any of your Favorite Fonts from what would otherwise be an overlong font list.

But Atlantis offers you a lot more practicality in this respect!

The "General" tab of the "Tools | Options..." dialog includes a "Use My Favourite Fonts only" option:

If you activate this option, the font lists in Atlantis will offer nothing but your Favorite Fonts:

If you don't intend to use any other font in your documents, this will make font selection a breeze. Note that this isn't so restrictive as it might sound: as we explained above, you can always add new fonts to the list of your favorite fonts.

Also note that activating the "Use My Favorite Fonts only" option does not affect existing documents previously formatted with other fonts than your Favorite Fonts. These documents will still be displayed as intended originally. The "Use My Favorite Fonts only" option only changes the number of fonts that Atlantis will offer to format or reformat text.

Favorite fonts can be applied directly from the keyboard. For this, you first need to associate each (or some) of your favorite fonts with a hot key. Here is how to proceed:

1) Choose the "Tools | Hot Keys..." menu command.

2) Select the "Fonts" category:

3) Click to select the font of interest:

4) Click in the "New hot key" box:

5) Press the desired hot key on your keyboard.

Alternatively click the "..." (three dots) button next to the "New hot key" box:

and choose any unused hot key from the list:

6) Press the Assign button:

7) OK out of the "Hot Keys" dialog.

After this you'll be able to apply your favorite fonts to selections of text with a simple press of the associated hot keys (in the above example, pressing the Ctrl+Shift+A hot key will format text with the "Achilles" font).

Finally a note regarding "uncommon" (rare) fonts.

If you are planning to send your documents to people, be careful to avoid formatting them with fonts unavailable on their systems. Documents formatted with "fonts missing on the destination system" will often display incorrectly, and in any case, not as intended. This is because font files are not embedded in RTF or DOC files. When documents are formatted with a missing font, word processors display them with substitute fonts chosen from the ones available on the current computer. So it is always preferable to avoid using "exotic fonts" in documents meant to be read on other systems. It is advisable to stick with a set of common fonts.

However, if you save your Atlantis documents as PDF, they will display correctly on any system since fonts automatically get embedded into PDF files.

And if you use Atlantis to save your documents as eBook, you'll have an option to embed the required fonts in the eBook file. In this case, your EPUB files will automatically be displayed with the original fonts.

The feel of paper

2010-04-26T18:11:00.002-04:00

All the time, through thousands of years of existence, humans have tried to record their knowledge, thoughts, impressions – in other words, the information that was important to them – to make it available to other humans. As human civilization evolved, different ways to store information were used. Our prehistoric ancestors painted on cave walls. Later, people carved texts on wax, clay or stone. Egyptians wrote on papyrus, others on parchment scrolls. Then for centuries, and especially since Gutenberg invented the printing press in mid-fifteenth century, paper books have been our main storage medium.

But following this we have seen the advent of fast personal computers and digital screens, and we might think that the age-old dominance of printed books is coming to an end. Just as floppy disks are no longer used to store or transfer information between computers, will the same happen to printed books? Will they be replaced by their electronic counterparts, the eBooks?

To many of us, eBooks are incommensurably superior to traditional paper books. eBooks are browsed or searched much more easily. eBooks are also easier to publish: they don't require printing, binding, they don't waste paper and ink, they will always be more compact than printed books. Any modern eBook reader with a size not larger than an average paper book can already store an amount of eBooks equivalent to a small library of printed books. eBooks have plenty of advantages over printed books. Some people believe that in a not too distant future printed books will only be kept in museums and private collections of bibliophiles. Who knows, maybe paper books are like dinosaurs whose time of extinction is nearing?

However, we know that there are still people who will always prefer the smell of ink and the feel of paper of the printed books they knew in "the good old days".

Where do you stand on this?

Below are various links to topical articles. We hope they'll help you form an unbiased educated opinion.

Some Thoughts About E-Reading

Ebooks vs. Paper Books

E-book vs. Paper Book

Publishing: ebooks vs. Paper Books

Environmental Impact Of E-Books vs. Paper Books

Ebooks Versus Paper Books: The Pros and Cons

How Green Is My iPad?

Testing the iPad's Trip-Worthiness

Automatic text wrapping

2010-04-20T09:34:00.002-04:00

There is one thing which all word processors do, and which is as natural for word processors to do as it is natural for rivers to flow. It is automatic text wrapping. What does this mean? "Automatic" means that you don't have to worry about it, word processors do it automatically for you. "Text wrapping" means that all newly typed text is carried over to the next paragraph line as soon as that text becomes too long to fit the screen. As a general rule, the maximal width allowed for a paragraph line is limited by the width and margins of the current page. When new text cannot be added to a line because it would exceed the boundary set for the lines of the current paragraph, word processors automatically wrap the text around. It isn't actually the case, but things then look as if line breaks had been inserted to wrap text around:

In the above picture, these virtual line breaks have been marked with red arrows. We say "virtual" because word processors do not automatically insert hard-coded line breaks in documents. "Virtual" or automatic line breaks terminating paragraph lines are dynamic: they are used only temporarily to lay the text out in the document window, or on the pages sent to the printer. When you edit a paragraph and add or remove words, word processors automatically create new automatic line breaks allowing the paragraph text to nicely reflow from one paragraph line over to the next line. Note that these ad hoc automatic line breaks are never saved to the document files. The paragraphs of saved documents only contain a continuous flow of text. But line breaks are automatically created again when you open a document.

Even though most of us do not even notice it, this is how all word processors work, including Atlantis.

Now there are cases when you might want such automatic line breaks to be saved to the document files. The most typical case is when you save a document as a plain text file. When plain text files are viewed in plain text editors, their paragraphs are either displayed as one continuous unbroken line, or wrapped around at window edge or after a set column value. But in any case the resulting layout would most likely be different from the one found in Atlantis: the line breaks would be inserted in different places.

If it is important to you to have the same line breaks in plain text editors as you get in Atlantis, you need to place actual hard-coded breaks at the end of each line in the original document in Atlantis. Here is how this can be done:

1. Open the target document in Atlantis, and select the fragment of document (one or multiple paragraphs) whose automatic line breaks you want to replace with hard-coded breaks.

2. Click the "Split paragraphs" toolbar button, or press the Ctrl+Shift+K,U hot key. Atlantis will automatically place paragraph end marks at the end of each paragraph line within the document selection. Note that paragraph end marks are visible only when the "View | Special Symbols" mode is on:

If you then save your document as a plain text file, and open it in a plain text editor like Notepad, you will get the same text wrapping (line breaks) as you had in the original source document in Atlantis:

Note that the "Split paragraphs" toolbar button is by default available through the Alternative toolbars in Atlantis. You might need to press Ctrl key twice to access this toolbar button.

Also a note regarding the Ctrl+Shift+K,U hot key. It is a so called compound hot key in Atlantis. Compound hot keys are 4-steps hot keys. You must:

1. Hold the Ctrl and Shift keys pressed,
2. Press and release the K key,
3. Press and release the U key,
4. Finally release the Ctrl and Shift keys.

You will find more information on compound hot keys in the corresponding topic of the Atlantis Word Processor Help.

Automatic Q&A patterns

2010-04-13T16:24:00.003-04:00

There are plenty of situations in real life, —hence in documents—, where questions alternate with answers in a regular manner: dialogs in movies, television and radio plays, court depositions, celebrity interviews, school tests, etc.

If you write this kind of documents or scripts yourself, you probably often wished there was a way to automate the task of entering the Q&A tags or the names of the characters in your dialogs. This is actually possible. You can use styles in such a way that a pattern of question and answer tags following each other is created whenever you press the Enter key. You won't have to type the Q&A tags or character names yourself. They will be inserted automatically.

We have composed a sample document demonstrating the use of styles to create automatic Q&A patterns. You can download this document from the Sample documents page of the Atlantis site, or by clicking the following direct link:

Questions and answers.rtf

Then open the document in Atlantis. The styles in this sample document have been designed in such way that you can create new "question" or "answer" paragraphs simply by clicking the Enter key. This sample document also contains detailed explanations and instructions.

Break gracefully (2)

2010-04-09T19:04:00.002-04:00

In the previous blog post, we suggested using the "page break before" paragraph formatting attribute as a safe way to add manual page breaks to documents. But there is still one more way to insert manual page breaks "safely" into documents.

In Atlantis, a document can be divided into multiple sections, and each document section can have its own headers/footers, page size and margins, footnote/endnote settings, etc. Two neighboring sections are always separated with a special nonprinting symbol called Section Break. When the "View | Special Symbols" mode is on, the Section Break symbols are visible. They look very much like Page Break symbols:

When you insert a section break into a document, the corresponding section is automatically divided up into two sections at the current cursor location. Section breaks can be inserted through the "Insert | Break | Section Break" menu, with a choice of four different types:

When you choose the "Next Page" section break type, the newly inserted Section Break works in many ways like any ordinary manual Page Break: any text following the Next Page section break will automatically be carried over to the next page. But there is still one important difference. Section breaks never create the kind of formatting problems that we have seen are inherent in the use of manual Page breaks (see previous blog entry). This is because the Section Break symbols always terminate the paragraphs they belong to: they actually always function as paragraph end marks. In other words, the paragraph end marks (pilcrow symbols) terminating ordinary paragraphs:

are absent from the paragraphs containing section breaks. These are terminated by Section Break symbols instead.

As you might recall (see previous blog entry), a manual "Page Break" symbol not only signals the end of the page it sits on, but it is also the first part of a paragraph whose rest is automatically carried over to the next page. Such "Page Break symbol paragraphs" always straddle two pages. On the contrary, Section breaks never break paragraphs across page boundaries. This is why section breaks could never create the kind of problems we have seen are possible with ordinary manual page breaks.

So section breaks can create "safe" page breaks in a document. However, section breaks should not be used as a substitute for ordinary page breaks. This is because section breaks normally play a much more important role in a document than just creating breaks in the text flow. Each document section bears a lot of specific formatting properties. So new sections (and consequently new section breaks) should be created only when they are actually needed: for example, when you want to have a different set of headers/footers for a particular fragment of document.

Break gracefully

2010-04-07T19:28:00.006-04:00

What happens when you try to add text to the last page of a document and there isn't enough space left to accommodate that new text? A new page is automatically created, and the text is carried over into the next page.

Now what if you do not want to wait until the current page gets filled up? What if you want to start afresh on a new page at once? The solution that comes to mind straightaway to most people is: "I only need to press Ctrl+Enter". That's right: Ctrl+Enter inserts a so-called manual page break symbol (or simply page break) into documents at the current location. When the "View | Special Symbols" mode is enabled, a page break symbol looks in this way:

Whenever Atlantis encounters this symbol within the flow of a document text, it creates a new page in the document, and carries all further text over to that new page.

To many, this is the most obvious method to forcefully create new pages in a document. But in spite of its simplicity, this method should be avoided whenever possible, especially by inexperienced users.

This is because the page break symbol in reality belongs to the paragraph carried forward to the next page. The page break symbol and the paragraph body that follows on the next page are actually one single paragraph ending with a common "paragraph end mark" (the so-called "pilcrow" symbol). When you insert a page break into a document, you create a new paragraph which is automatically broken into two parts:

The beginning of the paragraph (highlighted in green above) is essentially the page break symbol itself and remains on the page it was inserted into. The rest of the paragraph (highlighted in blue above) is carried over to the next page even though it comes right after the page break symbol. In the above picture, the whole of the paragraph straddling two pages is marked with a red border.

So a "Page Break" symbol not only signals the end of the page it sits on, but it is also part and parcel of the paragraph carried forward to the next page.

When the "View | Special Symbols" mode is on, the paragraph end marks terminating all paragraphs are easily seen:

But when this same "View | Special Symbols" mode is off, the paragraph end marks are not showing. It is then often very difficult to detect that a paragraph beginning with a "Page Break" symbol actually straddles two pages:

This is why paragraphs containing "Page Break" symbols are often a source of problems in documents.

Let's take up the same example.

If we place the cursor right before the first character of our "Page Break paragraph" on page #2:

and apply the "Heading 1" style to this paragraph, it might look as if only the second part of the paragraph was affected by this change:

This is simply because the change in the formatting applied to the "Page Break" symbol does not show: as a symbol, its display is unchangeable. But even then, any paragraph formatting applied to a "Page Break paragraph" will affect both parts of it on either side of the interpage divide.

So the "Heading 1" style was actually applied to the part of our paragraph on page #2, but also to the part remaining on page #1. This is easily demonstrated if we click at the end of page #1 right before the "Page Break" symbol, then type new text. It will automatically be formatted with a larger font size and bold attribute, i.e. with the formatting associated with the corresponding paragraph, that of the "Heading 1" style:

So "Page Break symbol paragraphs" can be a source of various formatting problems.

But this is not all. When they are referenced in a table of contents, both parts of these "Page Break symbol paragraphs" automatically get included in the corresponding table items. Sometimes with unexpected and undesirable results.

These are only a few examples of the many problems that can be created by "Page Break symbol paragraphs". This is why it is preferable to avoid inserting these "Page Break" symbols in documents.

Now you might ask "how do I create page breaks safely then?"

Here is how:

1) Click within the paragraph to be placed on the new page after the page break.

2) Run the "Format | Paragraph..." menu command, or press the associated hot key Ctrl+Shift+G.

3) In the "Paragraph Format" dialog, click to show the "Line & Page Breaks" tab, check the "Page break before" box, and OK out of the dialog:

The target paragraph will automatically be carried forward to the top of a new page. If the "View | Special Symbols" mode is on, you will notice a special mark on the left of the first line of that paragraph:

This kind of mark indicates that the corresponding paragraph will always be placed at the top of the page it is located in.

Note that toggling the "Page break before" attribute for a paragraph can also be done with the corresponding toolbar button:

This button is present by default on the Alternative set of toolbar commands of Atlantis.

A hot key can also be associated with the "Page break before" command through the "Tools | Hot Keys..." dialog:

Assigning a hot key to the "Page break before" attribute will allow you to toggle it for the current paragraph with a single key press.

As you probably know, the "Heading 1" style is traditionally applied to the paragraphs heading all new chapters. Also each new chapter usually starts on a new page. So it would be nice if applying the "Heading 1" style to a paragraph automatically placed that paragraph at the top of a new page, making it the heading of the new chapter. This is done by associating the "Page break before" attribute with the "Heading 1" style. Here is how to:

1) Run the "Format | Style..." menu command.

2) Select the "Heading 1" style, then press the "Modify..." button:

3) Click the "Paragraph..." button in the "Edit Style" dialog:

4) On the "Line & Page Breaks" tab of the "Paragraph Format" dialog, check the "Page break before" box, and OK out of all open dialogs.

Any paragraph associated with the "Heading 1" style will then automatically be formatted as set, and placed at the top of a new page.

Cleaning out document styles

2010-04-01T15:30:00.011-04:00

In Atlantis, each document contains a specific style list. Each of the styles in that list can in turn be associated with specific paragraphs of the same document. The styles of a document can be adjusted through the "Format | Style..." dialog, or through the Styles panel of the Atlantis Control Board. You can change the formatting borne by the document styles, remove styles from the document, or add new styles.

Note that Atlantis might add new styles to a document when you paste fragments copied from other documents. This normally happens when you paste fragments associated in the source document with a style missing from the target document. This is done fully automatically and does not require intervention on your part.

Now at times you might make changes to a document and remove all the paragraphs associated with a given style, or simply reassociate them with a different style. This invariably leads to items becoming "orphaned" in the document style list, i.e. styles no longer associated with any paragraph in the document.

This does not mean at all that a document with "orphaned" styles is invalid in some way. You can have as many styles as you wish in your documents, even when most of them are not actually used within the document body. However, having a big amount of unused styles in a document style list might cause real inconveniences. Locating a style in such oversized lists is usually rather awkward.

Atlantis does not have a command to remove unused styles from documents. But there is still a way to locate and remove unused styles if keeping the document style lists as clean as possible is important to you. This method takes time but in some cases you'd be truly a lot better off removing the clutter of unused styles from a document.

Here is how to proceed:

1) First, make sure that the Atlantis Control Board is displaying (if necessary, press F6 or toggle "View | Control Board" on). Click the "Styles" button at the top of the Control Board to open up the Control Board Styles panel:

2) Click the "tree" button at the top of the Styles panel to display the document style list in a hierarchical way:

3) Now you need to revise all the styles reported by the Styles panel, starting from the bottommost style and working up to the topmost style (we'll explain further down why styles have to be revised in that order). So first click the bottommost style name in the Style panel (in the above screen capture, the "TOC Title" style).

4) At the bottom of the Styles panel, click "Select paragraphs associated with highlighted style" (rightmost button):

— If the highlighted style does have associated paragraphs in the document, these will immediately be selected in the document window. Take this as a signal that the style is in use and should not be removed. In this case, select the next style up in the Styles list, and click "Select paragraphs associated with highlighted style" again.

— If the highlighted style does not have associated paragraphs in the document, you will get the following message:

This time, you can click the "Delete style" button at the bottom of the Styles panel:

Note that the "Header" and "Footer" styles are a special case. If you want to check if a "Header" or "Footer" style is actually associated with paragraphs of the current document, you need to first activate the corresponding areas in the document window. This is done by clicking "View | Header & Footer" or double-clicking the grayed-out header or footer area. If you do not activate these header and footer areas before clicking "Select paragraphs associated with highlighted style" to check a "Header" or "Footer" style, you will get the same message from Atlantis, actually telling you that "such paragraphs are part of currently unavailable portions of the document". And you won't know if the document "Header" or "Footer" styles are or are not associated with paragraphs in the document. So always make sure that the header and footer areas are "active" before you check the "Header" or "Footer" styles. Of course, the "Header" or "Footer" styles should not be removed if you have headers or footers in your document.

When you have finished checking the "Header" or "Footer" styles, and want to check other styles, do not forget to display the document main body by clicking "View | Header & Footer" again or double-clicking the document main body area.

Now let's explain why document styles have to be revised in reverse order (from bottom to top).

Some styles might have no associated paragraphs in the document but still play an important role as a base for other styles. For example, you could have a style named "Comment" bearing the basic formatting of all comments in a document. This "Comment" style might have several child styles like the "Positive comment", "Critical comment", and "Neutral comment" styles. These would all be based on the "Comment" style, and would naturally inherit all the formatting defined for their parent style. But these child styles would of course have specific characteristics. The "Positive comment" style could bear a green font color in addition to the base formatting inherited from the "Comment" parent style. The "Critical comment" style could add red font color. Etc. You would use the "Positive comment", "Critical comment", and "Neutral comment" child styles to format comments in the document. The "Comment" style would not be used to format document paragraphs directly, but it would still play an important role as the defining base for the other "comment styles".

If you tried to remove such a parent "Comment" style through the Styles panel, you would get the following message:

If you have not looked into the child styles associations yet, and don't know if paragraphs are associated with them, you won't be able to answer the "Yes/No" question in the above dialog safely. Removing the "Comment" style might affect any paragraphs associated with its child styles.

So you need to look into the child styles associations first before checking a parent style for its own associations with paragraphs. And since child styles are always displayed below the base style in the Styles panel,

you need to revise styles from bottom to top. In this way, you make sure that you always revise child styles before the corresponding base styles, and know if these base styles are associated with paragraphs in the document.

Accordingly, you should never remove a base style if you have previously found out that its child (or derived) styles do have associated paragraphs in the document. It would be like sawing off the branch these child styles are hanging on to! :)

Batch reencryption

2010-03-27T03:40:00.003-04:00

Do you have documents that you need to keep hidden from prying eyes? Most of us have such documents.

In Atlantis you can store any document in a special encrypted format. Once encrypted, a document can only be opened by those who know the password used to encrypt the document.

The Atlantis encryption is very secure. But there is still one thing that you are supposed to do as a document owner in order to keep your encrypted documents safely protected. You need to choose a good long password for each document. In this respect, our ImagiPass software can help you greatly in creating and memorizing long secure passwords for your documents.

Now for maximum security the best thing to do is to encrypt each document with a different password. But this is not always possible in practice, and quite many people use the same password to encrypt all their "sensitive" documents. If it is your case, here is one thing that will help you make things more secure: re-encrypt your documents with a different password from time to time. Using the same password to encrypt all your documents is risky but using it for a long time is even riskier. So it might be a good idea to switch to a new password from time to time.

If you have only one encrypted document, changing its password is simple. You only need to open the document with your old password, choose the "File | Save As..." menu command, and ask Atlantis to re-save it under its current filename. Obviously the "encrypted" format has to be kept in the "Save as type" box:

And when you click the "Save" button in this "Save document as" dialog, Atlantis will ask you for a new password.

This is how you can change the password for a single encrypted document.

But what if you have hundreds or even thousands of encrypted documents? Changing their passwords through the "File | Save As..." command of Atlantis would be a nightmare.

This is when the Atlantis Batch conversion feature comes in handy.

Let's suppose that you want to change the single password used for all the encrypted documents stored on your "C" disk. Here is how to proceed:

Choose the "File | Save Special | Batch Conversion..." menu command of Atlantis. Select "COD" as the source and target format in the "Batch Conversion" dialog. Also specify identical source and destination folders (the root of the "C" disk in our example):

Click OK in the "Batch conversion" dialog. Atlantis will require the password for the first COD document in the folder. Enter your "old" password (the one that you previously used to encrypt all your COD documents). Also make sure that "Try opening all encrypted documents with this password" is checked:

Click OK. Atlantis will display another window:

Specify a new password, and click OK. Atlantis will re-encrypt all the COD documents found on disk "C" with the new password.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.1

2010-03-22T03:18:00.002-04:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.1 is available as a public release.

You can find the complete list of new features and changes in this version of Atlantis by clicking here.

There are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

If you do not have Atlantis Word Processor on your computer yet, you can install this new version of Atlantis by running the latest setup file of Atlantis. Click here to download it.

Changing file associations

2010-03-19T14:17:00.003-04:00

All word processing applications have internal commands to open documents from hard disks. In Atlantis this command is found under the "File" menu:

This command simply calls up the "Open Document" dialog where you can select one or several documents to open in Atlantis. This is the standard traditional way to open documents from the running instance of any application. But in most cases you can open documents without first launching Atlantis manually and using its "File | Open..." command. Here is how it can be done.

When you double-click a document file name in Windows Explorer or its shortcut on your Desktop, Windows checks if the corresponding document type (RTF, DOC, TXT, etc) might not already be associated with a default application on your system. When this is the case, Windows launches the default application and asks it to open the double-clicked document.

Understandably, documents are traditionally associated with word processors: what better application could be used to deal with documents than a word processor? So when you double-click a document file name in Windows, it normally gets opened in the default word processor for the corresponding document type. You can start viewing or editing the document immediately.

Finding out which word processor is default for a given document type on your system is quite easy: simply double-click a document file name in Windows Explorer, and the associated default word processor will automatically be launched.

Now you might want to change the word processor currently used as default for a document type on your system.

This can be done when you install or upgrade Atlantis Word Processor. During setup, Atlantis displays a dialog with check boxes for the document types that it supports:

If you want to make Atlantis your default word processor for any of these document types, all you need to do is check the corresponding box(es) in the above dialog.

If you haven't associated a document type with Atlantis during install, and would like to do it later on, things are also very easy. Simply run the "Tools | File Associations..." main menu command in Atlantis. Atlantis will open the following dialog:

You can then use the left part of this dialog to select a file extension (or file "type") not yet associated with Atlantis, and associate it right away with a click on the … Associate button. :)

We recommend using Atlantis to associate file types, wether during install, or as we've just seen from the "Tools | File Associations..." dialog. This is because Atlantis not only associates itself with the requested document type, but it also memorizes which application was previously associated with the same document type. In this way, you can always easily revert to past associations from Atlantis, using the right part of the above "File Associations" dialog. You only have to select the document type to be dissociated from Atlantis, then to click the "Dissociate..." button.

Atlantis will not only dissociate itself from the selected document type, but it will also automatically restore the previous association. Let's take an example. Let's suppose that WordPad was originally your default application for RTF documents, and that you subsequently substituted Atlantis for this process. Atlantis will memorize that WordPad previously was your default word processor for RTF documents. If you later change your mind and ask Atlantis to dissociate itself from the RTF document type, it will do so but it will also restore the old default association of RTF documents with WordPad. Note that uninstalling Atlantis will also automatically restore file associations previously modified and "backed -up" by Atlantis.

Obviously, associating Atlantis with a document type is very easy. Dissociating it is just as easy.

Now Windows offers yet another way to change file associations. This won't "backup" previous associations, and consequently won't include a "dissociate" feature. But you can use it to associate ANY file type with ANY application under Windows. Here is how it goes:

Simply right-click a file of the desired type in Windows Explorer, and run the "Open With | Choose Program..." command from the menu:

This will bring up the "Open With" dialog. Choose a program from the list of "Recommended Programs", or click the "Browse..." button to choose a new default application for your document type:

After this, check "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file", and OK out of the dialog:

From then on you'll be able to open documents in your new default word processor by double-clicking their file names in Windows Explorer or on the Windows Desktop.

Please be careful. If you associate a document type with a wrong application, there won't be any automatic way to reverse changes. You will have to recreate the previous association manually.

Atlantis settings, or When the late bird gets the worm

2010-03-14T12:42:00.002-04:00

In most cases Atlantis is represented by a single button on the Windows Taskbar no matter how many documents you create or open simultaneously. On the other hand, each open document has its own separate button on the Atlantis Document Bar within the Atlantis main window. This is so that Atlantis will always leave enough elbowroom on the Windows Taskbar for the buttons of other applications. Having a single running instance of Atlantis also saves system resources: only one main window with menus, toolbars, status bar, Control Board is created instead of several.

So whenever possible Atlantis tries to keep only one running instance of itself. For example, when you double-click a document associated with Atlantis in Windows Explorer, your Windows system automatically starts launching a new instance of Atlantis to open that document. But this is not the whole story. When it is launched, Atlantis always checks if it might not already be running. When another instance of Atlantis is already running (and it is not busy displaying a modal dialog), the new instance launched by your Windows system simply shuts itself down quietly without even getting into view, and the requested document opens in the first running instance of Atlantis. In other words, Atlantis automatically cancels any redundant instance of itself.

However at times you might end up with two running instances of Atlantis, each running instance having its own "main window" and its own button on the Windows Taskbar. This happens when the first instance of Atlantis is busy performing some other important action and cannot be distracted from the job in hand. In such cases, a new instance of Atlantis is actually launched to answer the Windows system call.

Having several running instances of Atlantis is unproblematic provided your system has enough resources. What's more in some cases you have no choice but to run an extra instance of Atlantis in order to complete a task. Let's take an example. Let's suppose that you have started specifying properties for an eBook in the modal dialog displayed by the Save as eBook command of Atlantis. You then realize that you need to retrieve some of the required information from another Atlantis document. But you cannot open that document right now in Atlantis without closing the "Save as eBook" modal dialog. This would make you lose all the eBook properties already entered. In such cases, it is much smarter to leave the "Save as eBook" dialog open, but launch an extra instance of Atlantis, and open the document in that new instance.

You might ask "how do I launch a new instance of Atlantis?” Simply double-click the Atlantis shortcut on the Windows Desktop, or click the "Start" button on the Windows Taskbar and choose the Atlantis shortcut in the "Program Files" menu.

You can then open any relevant document in the new instance of Atlantis and send the required information to the Windows clipboard (select and copy with Ctrl+C). That information can then be pasted into the original "Save as eBook" dialog with Ctrl+V after you have switched to the first instance of Atlantis.

Of course, you can close the second instance of Atlantis when you have finished retrieving and pasting all the necessary information.

Again there is nothing wrong with running multiple instances of Atlantis. But there is one important caveat. Whenever you launch an instance of Atlantis, it normally loads its settings from the Windows Registry. When you close an instance of Atlantis, it also normally saves all its current settings back to the Windows Registry, including any changes that you might have made to them. Now at times you might configure the settings of each running instance of Atlantis differently. In such cases, it matters which running instance is closed last.

Let's take an example. Let's suppose that you have two running instances of Atlantis.

Let's suppose that you have assigned new hot keys to some commands in one of these two instances of Atlantis. You close that instance in any available way (i.e. pressing Alt+F4, or clicking the cross button on the title bar of the main window). It automatically saves its current settings (including your new hot keys) to the Registry.

Now you close the second running instance of Atlantis. It will also automatically save its current settings to the Registry. These settings will naturally override the settings saved by the first instance of Atlantis. But these latter settings do not include the new hot keys specified in the first running instance of Atlantis. In other words, the settings saved by the instance of Atlantis that you closed first are lost.

So when you run multiple instances of Atlantis, and you close them all, it is important to remember that only the settings of the last closed instance of Atlantis are kept in the Registry. In other words, when you launch Atlantis again, it will run with the settings that were last saved.

In practical terms, it will always be preferable to make configuration changes only in the running instance of Atlantis that you intend to close last.

Secret weapon of the Format Brush

2010-03-11T17:29:00.003-05:00

You could hardly be unaware of the Format Brush of Atlantis – a tool to format text exclusively with the mouse in the most convenient and natural way. Its button – – sits right in the middle of the Atlantis toolbars.

There are two standard ways to use the Format Brush:

1) If you need to format a single text fragment, select it in the document, then click a suitable format in the drop-down menu attached to the Format Brush toolbar button. The selected text fragment is immediately reformatted accordingly.

2) If you need to apply identical formatting to multiple text fragments, first make sure that there is no selection in the document (click anywhere in the document to cancel any selection). Then either click the Format Brush toolbar button, or directly choose a format in the associated drop-down menu. This will activate the special Format Brush mode. Since Atlantis has no selection to target, no formatting will be applied to the document straightaway. But the mouse pointer will take on a special shape if you hover it over any document text:

This "paintbrush" mouse cursor can now be used to "select" text fragments, just as you would with the standard mouse cursor. But you won't only select text. You will also apply the formatting currently loaded onto the Format Brush to the target fragments of text.

Now you might ask "how can I tell which formatting is loaded onto the Format Brush?" Or "how can I load different formatting attributes onto the Format Brush?"

As you probably noticed, when you activate the Format Brush mode some of the Atlantis toolbar commands become framed or highlighted with aqua, blue, or red coloring:

This special color coding indicates

which formatting will be applied – red color,
which will remain inactive (unchanged by the Format Brush) – aqua color,
and which will be removed if found in the target fragments (blue color).

In this way, you can tell what exactly will happen to the fragments you "select" with the special "paintbrush" mouse cursor. Note that the Format Brush color coding is explained in details in the corresponding topic of the Atlantis Help.

The formatting attributes loaded onto the Format Brush can be changed in two different ways. You can either

click any of the formatting toolbar commands framed with one of the 3 special colors, and adjust the corresponding value(s) as suitable,
or choose one of the preset Format Brush items available directly from the associated drop-down menu .

When you are done, you can cancel the Format Brush mode with a click on the Format Brush toolbar button itself , or with a press of the Esc key.

All the above is part and parcel of the standard behavior of the Atlantis Format Brush and it might be no news to you.

But you might not be aware of this other way of using the Atlantis Format Brush mode:

Let's suppose that the Format Brush mode is on, and you have loaded appropriate formatting characteristics onto the Format Brush. Put the mouse aside and use the keyboard instead. Use the cursor keys to navigate within the document text. In the document window, the blinking caret or "insertion cursor" will show you where any typing would add new text to the document. Type text as needed. The Format Brush mode being active, the typed text will automatically be formatted as specified for the current Format Brush.

For example let's suppose that you loaded "bold+italic" formatting onto the Format Brush. You can now add new "bold + italic" text to any spot in the document. Simply navigate to the target location with the cursor keys and start typing. Atlantis will automatically format the typed text as set for the Format Brush mode.

Batch conversion

2010-03-05T16:15:00.004-05:00

Changing the file type or format of a document (let's say from RTF to DOC, or from TXT to DOCX) is easily done with the "File | Save As..." command of Atlantis (F12). You only need to choose a different document format in the "Save as type" box of the "Save Document As" dialog:

This requires only a few mouse clicks and is OK if you want to change the format of only a few documents. But when you have many more documents to convert (sometimes hundreds or even thousands of them), the "Save As" method is inadequate. Things might take hours to complete and not be fail-safe (you might overlook some of the documents or convert them to a wrong format).

This is why Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.1 introduces a new feature allowing you to convert many documents at one go. Under the "File | Save Special" menu, you will find a new "Batch Conversion..." command:

This command, like all other commands in the "File | Save Special" menu, is mirrored in the drop-down menu of the "Save As" toolbar button:

This new "Batch Conversion" command displays a dialog allowing you to convert any number of documents with a few mouse clicks:

First, choose the format(s) of the documents to convert (you can select several file types together):

Then specify the location of the source documents (click the "Browse..." button):

And finally choose the target format and folder for the converted files:

Note that the Atlantis "Batch conversion" command always overrides existing files of same name if any. So we suggest you use or create an empty folder to host the converted files. But of course, you can choose any non-empty folder if you don’t mind overwriting existing files.
Also note that the source and target folders can be identical. In that case the converted files are placed alongside the source files.

When the "include subfolders" box is checked:

and the source folder does have subfolders, Atlantis

• converts all documents found in the source folder and all its subfolders,
• and places the converted files in the target folder, using mirror subfolders with corresponding names.

Of course, this "Batch conversion" command can be used to convert documents between the standard document formats supported by Atlantis (RTF, DOC, DOCX, ODT, COD and TXT). But it can also be used to convert documents to the EPUB format (the eBook format supported by Atlantis). You only need to choose "EPUB" as the target format in the drop-down:

This "Batch conversion" command has already been included in the latest beta version of Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.1 which you can download from the betatesting page.

Retrieving document pictures

2010-03-03T10:22:00.004-05:00

There are multiple ways to insert pictures in an Atlantis document. You can use the "Insert | Picture..." menu command or the associated toolbar button . You can also select the pictures in your file manager, then use your mouse pointer to drag & drop them into an Atlantis document. You can paste pictures into an Atlantis document if you previously put them onto the Windows clipboard (from Atlantis or any other application).

You can also collect pictures from Web pages in the Clippy Bank of Atlantis. Here is how to proceed:

1) Click the "Clippy Bank collects clipboard data" toolbar button .

You might need to switch to the Alternative set of toolbar buttons first to be able to use that particular button. The Alternative set of toolbar buttons itself is displayed by pressing the Ctrl key twice.

2) Send the target pictures from Web pages to the Windows clipboard by right-clicking them in a Web browser, and choosing the "Copy" command from the popup menu. These pictures will automatically be pasted into the Atlantis Clippy Bank (the Atlantis Clippy Bank is displayed with the F8 hot key or the "View | Clippy Bank" menu command).

But how do you retrieve pictures from an Atlantis document (including the Clippy Bank) and save them as graphic files to your disk?

Easy.

1) Press Ctrl+A to "select all" in the Atlantis document.

2) Scroll the document window with the mouse wheel or the vertical scrollbar until at least one of the pictures gets into view.

3) Right-click any of the pictures within the selection. The context menu that pops up will contain a "Pictures" sub-menu. The number in brackets after "Pictures" indicates how many pictures are present in the current selection:

Click to open the "Pictures" sub-menu, then click again to activate the "Save As..." command:

4) Atlantis will display the "Save Picture As" dialog window. Use the "Save as type" box to choose a graphic format for the pictures:

Also use the "File name" box to specify any appropriate name for the first graphic file.

If you choose a numberless name like "Picture.png" for the first picture, Atlantis will save all remaining graphic files in the current selection as "Picture2.png", "Picture3.png", and so on.

If you include a number right before the period in the filename – for example, "Image020.png" – Atlantis will save the remaining graphic files as "Image021.png", "Image022.png", and so on.

Running Atlantis with "factory" settings

2010-03-01T08:50:00.002-05:00

Hundreds of different options and settings are offered through different features of Atlantis. Most of them are saved to the Windows Registry when you close Atlantis, and reloaded from the Registry when you launch Atlantis again.

The only purpose of these different options is to allow you to customize Atlantis to your liking. By adjusting them you can make Atlantis work and look in the way YOU want. However, at times you might change a few settings accidentally or without anticipating how those changes will affect the behavior of Atlantis on your system. Some features of Atlantis might start working in a wrong way, or you might even be unable to complete your tasks in Atlantis.

In such cases, it is always a good idea to check if the current misbehavior of Atlantis might not be linked to your current Atlantis settings. The simplest way to do so is by launching a copy of Atlantis with its default "factory" settings. Here is how to proceed:

1) Click the "Start" button of the Windows Taskbar, and choose the "Run..." command. Alternatively just press the WinKey+R hot key of Windows.
This will open the "Run" dialog of Windows.

2) Paste the following command-line in the "Open" edit box:

"C:\Program Files\Atlantis\Atlantis.exe" -dls -dss

Note that the above command-line assumes that you installed Atlantis to the "C:\Program Files\Atlantis\" default folder. If you actually installed Atlantis in a different folder, you should adjust the above "Run" command-line accordingly.

3) Click the "OK" button in the "Run" dialog.

Since the command-line contains the "-dls" switch which means "don't load settings from anywhere", this will launch a copy of Atlantis with the default settings.
The "-dss" switch itself means "don't save modified settings on close". This is so that your previous Atlantis settings are not affected in the Windows Registry when you close such a copy of Atlantis.

Note that you might also need to reenter your registration details when you launch a copy of Atlantis through the above command-line. Otherwise Atlantis might fail to launch with its default settings.

Now that Atlantis is launched with its default settings, you can check out if it behaves correctly. If it does work correctly, it might be a good idea to replace the faulty Atlantis settings currently stored in the Windows Registry with the default settings of Atlantis. This is done with the following command-line:

"C:\Program Files\Atlantis\Atlantis.exe" -dls

Unlike the previous command-line, the above command-line does not include the "-dss" switch. This means that Atlantis will save its current settings to the Registry on close.

After that, Atlantis can be launched in the standard way through the "Start | Programs" menu of the Windows Taskbar, or by clicking the Atlantis shortcut on the Windows Desktop. Atlantis will then run smoothly with its "factory settings". You can still customize it again to your liking.

Highlighting and Font Format

2010-02-26T11:42:00.003-05:00

The "Highlight" tool is one of the most basic and often used features of Atlantis.

You can review documents and use specific background color(s) to highlight fragments of particular interest and draw readers' attention to them.

You can also use the "Highlight" tool as an ordinary font formatting tool to change the look of specific fragments. The "Banner creation" document demonstrates how the "Highlight" tool can be used to achieve various visual effects in a document. It is part of the Atlantis collection of Sample documents.

In Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.1, this "highlight color" (or simply "highlight") becomes a fully-fledged font formatting attribute:

1) You can now change the highlight characteristics of the document selection from the "Font | Format..." window of Atlantis:

2) The "Copy font format" and "Paste font format" commands of Atlantis now transfer highlight colors between text fragments.

3) The Highlight attribute can now be included in paragraph styles through the "Format | Style... > Modify... > Font..." command, or through the corresponding commands of the Styles panel of the Atlantis Control Board.

4) Highlight can also be included in the Format Palette items, and consequently used through the Format Brush tool of Atlantis.

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.1 is currently under betatesting. You can download it from the Betatesting page of our site.

Opening multiple documents

2010-02-24T11:50:00.004-05:00

When you open documents in Atlantis with the "File | Open..." menu command, or the corresponding toolbar button , or the associated hot key (Ctrl+O), Atlantis displays the "Open Document" window. You click in the left pane of the window to select the target document file, then press the "Open" button. Or even simpler, you just double-click the document file in the left pane. Atlantis opens the target document.

Now you might want to open several documents together. In such cases, you can always call up the "Open Document" dialog repeatedly as many times as necessary to open each document separately, one after the other. But this is extremely cumbersome. As a matter of fact, there is a much more convenient and faster way to open several documents together.

Let's suppose that you have plenty of document files in a folder on your hard disk:

Let's now suppose that you want to open all documents from document number "50" to "59" (files "Doc50.rtf" through to "Doc59.rtf"). All you need to do is click to select the first document in your target group ("Doc50.rtf" in our example):

When the first document is selected in this way, press and hold the Shift key down, and click to select the last document of your target group ("Doc59.rtf" in our example). All the documents from first to last in the target group will automatically be selected in the "Open Document" window:

Release the Shift key and avoid clicking in the file list again. Instead, click the "Open" button. All 10 files will open together in Atlantis.

At times, you might want to open documents that are not listed contiguously in the "Open Document" window. This is also extremely easy. Let's suppose that you want to open "Doc50.rtf", "Doc65.rtf", "Doc72.rtf", "Doc86.rtf", and "Doc99.rtf" in the same folder. Here is how to proceed.

First, click to select "Doc50.rtf" (the first file of interest):

Then press and hold the Ctrl key down, and click repeatedly to select each one of the other files of interest ("Doc65.rtf", "Doc72.rtf", "Doc86.rtf", and "Doc99.rtf" in our example):

Release the Ctrl key and avoid clicking in the file list again. Instead, click the "Open" button. The selected files will open together in Atlantis.

We just saw that you can add a file to a selection if you press and hold the Ctrl key down, then click on an unselected file name. But at times you might want to remove one or several files from a selection. This is also done with the Ctrl key: press and hold the Ctrl key down, then click on an already selected file name. That file will automatically be removed from the selection.

Let's take an example. Let's suppose that you need to open documents "Doc50.rtf" through "Doc99.rtf" except document files "Doc70.rtf" and "Doc80.rtf". For this, click the first document "Doc50.rtf", then press and hold the Shift key, click "Doc99.rtf", and release the Shift key. This will select all documents from "Doc50.rtf" through to "Doc99.rtf":

Now we want to exclude files "Doc70.rtf" and "Doc80.rtf" from the above list. Let's press and hold the Ctrl key down, and click the "Doc70.rtf" and "Doc80.rtf" file names. They will automatically be excluded from the selection:

Release the Ctrl key and avoid clicking in the file list again. Instead, click the "Open" button. The selected files will open together in Atlantis.

Default toolbar commands

2010-02-22T11:27:00.004-05:00

As you probably know, you can customize the Atlantis toolbars through the "Tools | Toolbars..." menu command. You can remove the toolbar buttons that you do not use, add the command buttons that you need, move the buttons around to your convenience. And you can also restore the default set of original toolbars using the "Restore Default" button in the "Tools | Toolbars..." dialog.

Obviously this default set of toolbar commands is the one you find when you make a clean install of Atlantis. It will be changed in the upcoming version of Atlantis 1.6.5.1. Here is how the Main set of toolbar commands will look like (click to enlarge):

And the new Alternative set (which is displayed when you press the Ctrl key twice, or click the "Switch toolbars" button):

The "Switch toolbars" and the "Go to" buttons will also look differently:

Switch toolbars

Go to

Note that this new default set of toolbar commands will not affect the existing installations of Atlantis. If you want to use the new default set of toolbar commands, you will have to click the "Restore Default" button in the "Tools | Toolbars..." dialog.

This new default set of toolbar commands has already been included in the latest beta version of Atlantis.

Page breaks in eBooks

2010-02-18T11:52:00.004-05:00

EPUB – the format in which Atlantis saves eBooks – is a reflowable format. This means that all EPUB eBooks are actually formatted as a continuous flow of text without predefined page boundaries. This is so that EPUB files will naturally display properly on all devices regardless of screen size, - from the tiniest mobile phones to the biggest monitors of desktop computers.

But in practice most eReaders "paginate" the EPUB files before displaying them: they divide the book contents into separate "pages" according to their own native display size and settings. Consequently, eBook authors do not have much control over the way their books get paginated in a particular eBook reader. Before actually opening the eBook in an eReader, it is impossible to predict how many pages a particular eBook will have on that eReader and on which page a particular paragraph of the source document will appear.

This said, there are still a couple of things relating to eBook pagination that you should keep in mind when you design an eBook.

Normally eReaders paginate books with "optimal fill": they create a new "page" only when there is no more space for text on the previous page. Even then, you might sometimes notice an unintended break in the middle of a page. To explain this, we need to take a deeper look at the inner workings of EPUB files.

As a matter of fact, all eBooks in the EPUB format are actually ZIP files with .epub as a substitute file extension. If you change the extension of an .epub file to .zip, you can open it with any ZIP software or directly with Windows Explorer, if you have Windows XP or higher.

Now all EPUB files generated by Atlantis contain a "Meta-inf" and a "Ops" folder, plus a "mimetype" file:

The actual contents of the eBook – text and images – are stored under the "Ops" folder. You will always find at least one file with the .html extension within that folder, but sometimes there will be multiple .html files:

Each of these .html files represent a fragment of the eBook. If you extract them from the EPUB-ZIP file, you can view them in any Web browser. eReaders naturally display the contents of each .html file as a continuous flow of text. But at the same time, most eReaders will never put the contents of multiple .html files on the same "page". In other words, eReaders display these neighboring .html files as if there was a page break between them.

So the more HTML files are included in an EPUB file, the more unintended page breaks there will be in the eReader display. This is why Atlantis always tries to divide the document contents into as few .html files as possible when it generates an EPUB file. In many cases, Atlantis creates a single .html file for the entire book contents so that your EPUB file won’t get displayed with unintended page breaks. But there are a few cases when Atlantis has to save the eBook contents to multiple .html files:

1) Atlantis creates a separate .html file for any paragraph from the source document containing nothing but a "big" portrait-oriented picture (a picture whose width is at least 300 pixels and height at least 400 pixels, or whose height:width ratio is in the range 1.1 to 1.7). The first such picture of the source document is also treated by Atlantis as the book cover image. Let’s suppose for instance that one of the paragraphs in a source document contains nothing but a 300x400 or 400x500 pixels picture. Atlantis will save this paragraph (and of course the included picture) to the EPUB file as a separate .html file. This is done in order to allow proper display of big pictures on devices with small screens.

2) Some eReaders are unable to load HTML files larger than 300 KB. Atlantis takes this into account when the source document cannot be saved to an EPUB file as one single HTML file lighter than 300 KB. In such cases, Atlantis splits the book contents into several .html files, each smaller than 300 KB if necessary.

So now you know when and why Atlantis might save a source document to an EPUB file including multiple .html files. As a result, that EPUB file will display with corresponding page breaks in the current eReaders.

You might ask "what if I want to insert page breaks in my eBooks myself?”

It is done very simply. Just create manual page breaks in the source document, and Atlantis will automatically save matching page breaks to the EPUB file.

As you know, there are 2 ways to create manual page breaks in source documents in Atlantis. You can press the Ctrl+Enter hot key and insert a "page break" symbol in the document: any text that follows a "page break" symbol will automatically appear on the next page. But there is another and preferable way to create a manual page break in a document: it is by enabling the "Page break before" attribute in the format of a particular paragraph. When you want a paragraph to be always displayed at the top of a page, choose the "Format | Paragraph..." menu command, and check the "Page break before" box on the "Line & Page Breaks" tab:

Quite often this attribute is enabled by default for the "Heading 1" style (this can be done through the "Format | Style... > Heading 1 > Modify... > Paragraph..." dialog). In this way, all the book chapters preceded by a "Heading 1" paragraph (the chapter "heading") start on a new page.

"Print layout" vs "Print preview"

2010-02-15T19:13:00.005-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor can display documents in the Print Layout view mode: documents are displayed as a sequence of pages, each page being seemingly represented on a separate "paper sheet".
But you also have a Print Preview mode at your disposal through the "File | Preview..." command, or the corresponding toolbar button , or the associated hot key Ctrl+F2.

You might have noticed that in most cases documents look identically under the standard Print Layout view mode and under the Print Preview mode. Why then have the Print Preview mode at all if this mode produces the same display as the standard Print Layout mode?

It is true that these two view modes are very similar, but there are still differences:

1) Under the Print Preview mode, Atlantis displays documents as closely as possible to what you will get when the documents are actually printed to paper. This is important because all printers have proprietary "physical margins" beyond which they are unable to print. So if you want your documents to be printed correctly, the page margins of your documents should not be smaller than the minimal margins allowed by your printer. When you specify "too small" margins in the "File | Page Settings..." dialog, Atlantis automatically suggests to correct them:

Now you can ignore these suggestions, and still define margins that are "too small" for your printer. This is when the Atlantis Print Layout and the Print Preview modes behave differently. The Print Layout view will display the page margins as set in the "File | Page Settings..." dialog but it won't show you that they are "too small" for your default printer. On the contrary, the Print Preview automatically shows which areas of the document pages will not get printed, i.e. will actually be cut off on printing:

2) As you probably know, you can use the "Color" tab of the "Tools | Options..." dialog to customize the colors used by Atlantis to display page background and text in the document window. But these special colors are only meant for on screen convenience: they might not print AS IS. This is also why these special colors never affect the display in the Print Preview mode. As the name indicates, under the Print Preview mode the documents are simply displayed with the colors they will have when printed to paper, not as you want them to appear on screen. So the page background is always white under the Print Preview mode, and text formatted with the "automatic" font color is always black.

3) When "Update fields on print" is checked in the "Tools | Options..." dialog:

and you activate the Print Preview mode, Atlantis automatically updates all the "updatable" fields of the current document. The page numbers get updated within the tables of contents. The date & time-related fields and page references also get updated. Etc.

4) Atlantis remembers the zooming factor that you last used under the Print Preview mode, and automatically reloads it the next time you activate this mode.

Hanging indents (2)

2010-02-09T12:27:00.010-05:00

We recently posted a blog showing how to create hanging indents in Atlantis with a few tab stops and Ctrl+T to align lines vertically. The examples we gave were basic "one-tier" structures:

But at times you might want to build "two-tier" hanging indents like this one:

Here is how to proceed in a few easy steps:

1. Make sure the "Special Symbols" mode is on in the Atlantis document window (Ctrl+Shift+8). All the typed characters will be visible: this will make things easier for you.

2. Type the whole of your text like this:

Note that the first-level paragraphs are all preceded by a tab character: this is because you want all these (three) items to align vertically. Also note that the second-level paragraphs have lines separated by "line breaks" (Shift+Enter).

Obviously, the above "draft" text needs to be formatted further to achieve the desired effect.

We need to push the second-level lines (the literary works) to the right so that they align vertically as intended (under their respective author's name).

Let's place the insertion cursor within the first batch of these second-level lines (in our example, within the works of Joyce), and press Ctrl+M repeatedly until we achieve the desired alignment, like so:

We now need to repeat the same procedure for the second and third batch of second-level lines (in our example, within the works of Wolf and Lowry), with this as a result:

The second and third first-level paragraphs now need to be pushed to the right to align them vertically with the first first-level paragraph. This is done by selecting them both first:

We can now press Ctrl+M repeatedly until we achieve the desired effect:

Here is the same text with the "Special Symbol" mode off:

This tip is also available as a downlodable document in the RTF format.

Atlantis 1.6.5.1: Miscellaneous improvements

2010-02-08T20:29:00.006-05:00

Besides a new Draft view mode, the latest 1.6.5.1 beta version of Atlantis Word Processor includes various other improvements:

1) As you probably know, the Atlantis "Open Document" and "Save Document As" dialogs can display a "Readable preview" of the selected document:

In previous versions of Atlantis, this "Readable preview" was displayed as a continuous flow of text without page margins and breaks, but in practice it often included big undesirable gaps:

These unwanted gaps are no longer present in the latest 1.6.5.1 beta version of Atlantis. The "readable" previews now truly display a continuous flow of text:

2) A similar improvement affects the Print Layout view mode. Previously if a document had several sections each with different page settings (for example if some pages had "portrait" orientation and others "landscape" orientation), Atlantis often displayed unreasonably big gaps between neighboring pages:

This won't happen any more in the new version of Atlantis. Neighboring pages will always be displayed with minimal interpage spacing.

3) At times, a horizontal scrollbar was present at the bottom of the document window even when no such scrolling was possible (this happened when the active document was displayed under any zoom type except the "Page width" or "Text width" zoom types):

In the new Atlantis version, the horizontal scrollbar will only appear purposefully. Accordingly, you'll get more vertical screen space when the scrollbar is not displayed.

The Window is the Limit

2010-02-06T07:05:00.007-05:00

If you have already grabbed a copy of the latest beta version of Atlantis with a new Draft view mode, you probably noticed many differences between this new Draft view mode and the more traditional Print Layout view mode. But these two view modes had one thing in common. Under both modes, the text was wrapped according to the document "page width" as found in the "File | Page Settings..." dialog. As a result of this "wrapping to page width", quite a lot of window space was wasted under the Draft view mode. The following screen capture illustrates this (click it to enlarge):

As you can see, the screen area located to the right of the red line was not used because it lies beyond the set "page width" of the document. This is how the Draft view mode of Atlantis works by default. This wasted space is the price to pay to have accurate indication of tab stop positions and paragraph indents (namely the right indent) on the horizontal ruler of the document window.

However, if you don't need exact measurements on the horizontal ruler under the Draft view, and you'd rather have the document text extend from left to right edge so that no screen space is wasted, a new option of the latest beta version of Atlantis allows you to have such a display. This new option is available on the "View" tab of the "Tools | Options..." dialog:

You will check this "wrap to window" option if you want the document text to be wrapped to the right edge of the document window rather than to the right edge of the horizontal ruler under the Draft view mode:

Note that this latest beta version of Atlantis has two new buttons located above the vertical scroll bar of the document window:

You can use these buttons to switch between the Draft and Print layout view modes of Atlantis.

As always, the Betatesting page of the Atlantis site is the place to look for the latest beta version of Atlantis Word Processor.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5.1 (beta)

2010-02-03T18:30:00.001-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.1 is now available for betatesting.

This version of Atlantis introduces a new Draft viewing mode.

You can find details on this new version of Atlantis on the Betatesting page.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5

2010-01-28T12:59:00.002-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5 is available as a public release.

You can find the complete list of new features and changes in this version of Atlantis by clicking here.

As always, there are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

Power Type is speeding up

2010-01-25T05:51:00.002-05:00

Here is one more improvement that you will find in Atlantis version 1.6.5.

Power Type – the Atlantis typing assist – is a handy tool that helps you type text in less keystrokes. As you type text in Atlantis, Power Type collects statistical information about the typed words and their usual environment. As time goes on, the typing suggestions become more and more appropriate. You only have to select a word in the Power Type pop-up, press the Enter key, and it gets automatically inserted on-the-fly:

Now if you have been using this Power Type feature over an extended period of time (for months or even years), you probably noticed the Power Type suggestions popping up with a marked delay. This was due to the fact that Atlantis took more and more time to compose the lists of Power Type suggestions. This led paradoxically to a slower response to keystrokes and a general slow down of typing.

We have corrected this. Atlantis 1.6.5 will build and display the Power Type suggestions much faster than before, no matter how long you have been using this feature. Your keystrokes will be followed by an instant response from Atlantis.

This improvement has already been included in the latest beta version of Atlantis.

Updating under Vista

2010-01-20T15:54:00.006-05:00

When new versions of Atlantis are released, you can update your copy of Atlantis in several different ways. The simplest and most convenient of them is the Atlantis "Help | Check for Updates..." menu command. It checks the Atlantis site to determine if any updates are available. If so, you can upgrade your copy of Atlantis with a few mouse clicks and following simple onscreen instructions.

Regrettably the "Check for Updates" command of Atlantis did not work as expected under Windows Vista. It downloaded the updates to your PC, then asked your permission to close Atlantis:

You clicked the OK button, and Atlantis shut itself down. At that point, the update process stalled on some systems. Atlantis tried to launch the update module, but it was blocked by the User Account Control of Windows. So the update process was never actually completed.

This will be fixed in Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5. The update process will continue with a message from the User Account Control of Vista:

You will only need to click "Allow" to launch the update module of Atlantis.

Getting less noisy

2010-01-19T05:31:00.002-05:00

A new review of Atlantis Word Processor has just been published by IT Reviews:

http://www.itreviews.co.uk/software/s845.htm

It's an interesting review with a few critical notes. One of them deals with the Atlantis sounds. The author finds Atlantis "too noisy". As a matter of fact, the Atlantis default setup includes the Standard sound scheme with sounds for plenty of events. We understand that some of our first-time users might feel that Atlantis at times sounds more like a jukebox than a word processor. In the past, some of them actually asked in desperation how they could possibly disable these sounds.

So we've decided to take our cue from this latest review of Atlantis and change the way the Atlantis Sounds are installed. Any new release of Atlantis will install the Basic sound scheme with the typewriter sounds plus a few other really useful sounds, for events such as a "Caps Lock toggle" or a "potential misspelling". In this way, new Atlantis users will not get a too noisy "Hello" from Atlantis.

For those who want more sounds, the complete sound scheme with about 100 sounds will be available as an optional download from the Atlantis site.

Lifting limitations

2010-01-16T03:01:00.002-05:00

As you probably know, characters can be formatted as "small caps" in Atlantis. You simply select a text fragment, choose the "Format | Font..." menu command, and check the "Small caps" box.

"Small caps" formatting does not change the document text, it only makes the lowercase letters look like small capital letters:

Even though "small caps" is one of the font formatting attributes allowed in XHTML, and consequently in eBooks in the EPUB format, none of the major eBook readers currently can display "small caps" text correctly.

So what happened when you saved a document as eBook in Atlantis and it contained text formatted in "small caps"? Atlantis did save the corresponding "small caps" formatting to the eBook file. But if you opened that eBook in Adobe Digital Editions or Sony Reader, the "small caps" text looked as ordinary lowercase text.

We obviously could not improve the way existing eBook readers display "small caps". But we have implemented a workaround for this particular limitation of eReaders. From now on Atlantis will simulate "small caps" formatting in the eBooks it creates by applying both the uppercase pattern and a reduced font size to lowercase letters formatted with "small caps". In other words, instead of keeping the "small caps" formatting of the original text, Atlantis will convert it to uppercase with reduced font size. It won't be "small caps" per se but it will look exactly like it in the eReaders.

And there is more. "All caps" formatting as can be found in the "Format | Font..." dialog of Atlantis is also unsupported by the current eBook readers. We needed another workaround here. So from now on Atlantis will simulate "all caps" formatting in the eBooks it creates by applying the uppercase pattern to any "all caps" fragments of text when saving them to an eBook.

When saved to an eBook, the original "small caps" and "all caps" texts will look in eReaders in the same way as they do in Atlantis.

This improvement has already been included in the latest beta version of Atlantis.

Samples go online

2010-01-10T07:02:00.001-05:00

If you ever browsed the home folder of Atlantis Word Processor with your file manager, you probably noticed the "Samples" subfolder under "C:\Program Files\Atlantis\". Surely you did not find it hard to guess that it contained ... sample documents. :) The Atlantis Help made reference to some of them, like for instance a document named "Bulleted & Numbered Lists" demonstrating unusual list formats.

We also had a collection of sample documents available for download as a ZIP file from the Downloads page of the Atlantis site.

It so happened that the local "Samples" folder on your hard disk and the ZIP file available for download on the Atlantis site contained very similar documents with similar purposes. We have decided to place all these sample documents in one single location. They are now available on a new dedicated page of the Atlantis site:

http://www.AtlantisWordProcessor.com/en/samples

Accordingly, the next setup files of Atlantis will be lighter: they will not be loaded with sample documents anymore.

eBook cover images and Mobipocket

2010-01-08T23:37:00.005-05:00

The latest beta version of Atlantis Word Processor saves cover images to eBooks in a more friendly way towards the Mobipocket Reader, one of the most popular eBook readers.

So what has been improved in the Save as eBook feature of Atlantis?

Previously if you saved an eBook in Atlantis, and viewed it in Mobipocket Reader, a blank preview was displayed for the book:

Now if you save an eBook in the latest version of Atlantis, Mobipocket Reader will display a nice preview of the book cover image:

The display of Atlantis EPUBs in other e-readers like Adobe Digital Editions and Sony eReader will not be affected by this latest change to the "Save as eBook" feature of Atlantis.

Moving text with a key press

2010-01-06T17:46:00.005-05:00

As you might be well aware, there are many ways to move fragments of text within documents. For example, you can use the "cut & paste" method, or if you prefer performing actions with the mouse, "drag & drop".

These methods are fast and easy. They require only a few key presses or mouse clicks. But in some cases you can move text even faster, with only one single key press.

A one-key-press move is possible when you need to move all of the current paragraph, or a selection of paragraphs. Let's take an example.

Let's suppose that you have a list of operating systems in a document. As you can see on the following picture, the name of each Windows version was placed in a separate paragraph (note that a pilcrow symbol terminates each paragraph; pilcrow symbols are visible when you enable the "View | Special Symbols" mode):

Now let's suppose that you want to arrange the names of these Windows systems in chronological order according to their release dates. The current paragraph is "Windows XP", and of course it should be moved up the list.

Let's press the Shift+Alt+Up key combination, and see what happens:

The "Windows XP" paragraph has been moved above the "Windows 7" paragraph.

Now if we press Shift+Alt+Up again, this same "Windows XP" paragraph will appear between the "Windows 2000" and "Windows Vista" paragraphs:

So the Shift+Alt+Up hot key moves the current paragraph up. In other words, it swaps the current and the previous paragraphs. Naturally there is a hot key performing the reverse move: Shift+Alt+Down moves the current paragraph down, ie swaps the current and the next paragraphs.

But that is not all. You can not only move individual paragraphs but also a selection of paragraphs.

Let's get back to the initial order of the Windows versions in our sample list:

Let's select the "Windows Vista" and "Windows 7" paragraphs with the keyboard or mouse:

Pressing the Alt+Shift+Down hot key will move these two paragraphs down and place them after the "Windows XP" paragraph:

Hanging indents

2010-01-01T23:37:00.014-05:00

The above paragraph is formatted as a "hanging indent". Hanging indents are sometimes also called "outdents".

By default, hanging indents are used automatically by Atlantis when you format paragraphs as bulleted, numbered or outline items.

But you might need to create hanging indents manually yourself in Atlantis. This is generally required in most standard writing styles for bibliography notes. The author's name juts out to the left, while the rest of the paragraph is indented inwards:

Hanging indents are also often used to format dialogs in theatrical plays:

Now here is how to create such hanging indents in Atlantis.

Let's suppose that you have the following bibliography note:

To conform to official writing standards, you need to "outdent" the first line of this paragraph.

1. Place the insertion cursor within the paragraph.

2. Press Ctrl+T. The second and subsequent lines (if any) will start moving to the right. Press Ctrl+T repeatedly as many times as necessary to create the proper "outdent". Press Ctrl+Shift+T if you've gone too far and want to go back. In this particular case, pressing Ctrl+T once will probably be enough.

You should get this:

Now let's pretend that you have jotted down the following drama script:

The above script would look better and be easier to read if each paragraph was formatted with hanging indent.

The first thing to do if you haven't already done so is to insert a tab mark where you want the lines to start aligning vertically, i.e. after each character name "heading". Tab characters are inserted with a press of the Tab key. They display as right arrows under the "View | Special Symbols" mode of Atlantis:

Then select all paragraphs, and press Ctrl+T. The second and subsequent lines of the selected paragraphs will start moving to the right:

Press Ctrl+T repeatedly as many times as necessary to achieve the desired indenting. You should get something like this:

If you have created too much overhang, press Ctrl+Shift+T. This will move the lines back.

If you prefer Justified alignment for your paragraphs, you can apply it to the same selection with Ctrl+J and get this:

Here is another use of hanging indents. At times, you might want to create a hanging indent for a manual list of items.

First, type your list in the following way: insert a Tab character after the list title (press the Tab key); and use Shift+Enter to insert line breaks after each list item but last. Line breaks display as small "crooked" left arrows when you enable the "View | Special Symbols" mode of Atlantis:

Leave the insertion cursor where it is (i.e. within the paragraph which you want to format as a "hanging indent"), and press Ctrl+T repeatedly until the second and subsequent lines align vertically in the desired way, like this:

Surely you can now see the beauty and ease of using hanging indents.

Font embedding in eBooks

2009-12-26T11:46:00.007-05:00

If you compose or read eBooks exclusively in the English language, you will probably never notice a limitation present in the eBook readers like Adobe Digital Editions and Sony eBook Reader. Their built-in fonts are sufficient to display English texts correctly, but they miss some of the glyphs necessary for the display of extended Latin characters, and especially non-Latin characters.

Let's take an example. Here is a Greek text fragment as it displays in Atlantis:

If you save it as eBook in Atlantis, then open the resulting EPUB file in Adobe Digital Editions, you will see something like this:

This might be all Greek to you :) ... but you will have noticed the question marks within the words. Being unable to display some of the Greek characters in this text, ADE simply replaced them with question marks. This is because the ADE built-in fonts do not include the corresponding glyphs. So if your eBooks contain Greek, Polish, Baltic, Cyrillic or Asian characters, most likely they won't display correctly in the currently available eBook readers.

You might say "what if I embedded the appropriate fonts in my EPUB files?" This is OK because the EPUB standard supports font embedding in eBooks. In other words, you can include the necessary font files within the eBooks themselves. In this way, the eBook readers won't miss any character glyph.

Font embedding in EPUB files can be done manually. A number of tutorials are available on the Web. But the procedure is quite tricky and time-consuming, especially to inexperienced users.

This is when Atlantis comes in very handy! Atlantis is now able to embed fonts in eBooks automatically. The "Save as eBook" dialog of Atlantis has a new check box to "Embed fonts":

When this option is enabled, Atlantis automatically embeds all the necessary fonts in the saved EPUB files. You don't have to worry any more. EPUB readers automatically use any embedded fonts to display the eBooks.

Let's take our example again. This time we have saved our Greek document as EPUB from Atlantis with the "Embed fonts" option enabled. Here is the same text fragment viewed in Adobe Digital Editions with embedded fonts:

As you can see, the question marks have disappeared. All the characters are displayed correctly.

Atlantis normally embeds all the fonts used in the original document. But if you click the "Exceptions..." button right below the "Embed fonts" box:

you can instruct Atlantis not to embed specific fonts:

If you embed fonts in your EPUB files, their display in the e-readers will be as faithful as possible to the original document display. This might sound great. But there are a few snags. You should take them into account before deciding to embed fonts in your eBooks:

1) The two major eBook readers – Adobe Digital Editions and Sony Reader – support font embedding in EPUBs. But if your eBooks are meant exclusively for another eBook reader, embedding fonts in them makes no sense since these other eBook readers currently do not support font embedding.

2) Embedded fonts can significantly increase the size of your eBook files. Generating an EPUB file with the "Embed fonts" box checked might add megabytes to the size of the resulting eBook file. So if there are limitations regarding the size of your eBook files, font embedding might not be an option.

3) By embedding fonts in your eBook files, you force the eBook readers to use the embedded fonts rather than their built-in fonts. In this way, the eBook will mimic the original look of your document. But fonts which are good for monitors with big screens, might worsen readability of your eBook on portable devices with small screens. In addition, your eBook with embedded fonts might look quite differently compared to the display of other more "traditional" eBooks with no embedded fonts. This might also inconvenience the readers of your eBooks.

On the whole, it is preferable to avoid font embedding in eBooks whenever possible. This is why the "Embed fonts" option is initially off in Atlantis. We recommend that you use font embedding only when your documents contain non-Latin characters, or when it is impossible to reflect the book style without its original fonts. But as always, it is up to you to decide which move is more appropriate.

You can already try this new font embedding feature. It is included in the latest beta version of Atlantis Word Processor. You can download it from the Betatesting page of the Atlantis site, and install it to your PC.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-23T14:31:00.002-05:00

The Atlantis Word Processor team is sending the warmest Christmas wishes to you and your family.

May joy and happiness always be with you!

Beta versions: Easy upgrading

2009-12-21T08:44:00.006-05:00

Checking for updates to Atlantis Word Processor and updating it is as simple as 1-2-3. You run the "Help | Check for Updates..." menu command from Atlantis itself and follow simple onscreen instructions.

But things were not that simple and convenient when it came to beta versions of Atlantis. Beta versions of Atlantis could only be updated manually. Interested end-users were supposed to make regular visits to the Atlantis Betatesting page, and download the new beta builds manually.

We have now simplified matters for our betatesters:

1) Individual beta builds of Atlantis always have a specific code number. That code number is displayed in the right topmost corner of the online Betatesting page:

But up to now that specific beta number was never displayed in the "Help | About..." window. Actually it was not even possible to tell when a given copy of Atlantis was beta.

The "Help | About..." window of Atlantis betas now displays these specific version numbers, and signals a beta version:

The Setup files of Atlantis beta versions now also display this information:

2) The "Help | Check for Updates..." dialog of Atlantis betas will allow you to upgrade to new beta builds of Atlantis:

Clicking "Yes" will allow you to upgrade your beta version of Atlantis without visiting the Betatesting page manually. You only need to follow the onscreen instructions.

3) Previously when the betatesting phase of a particular version of Atlantis was over, that version was released as a public version. But there was no automatic way to replace a beta version of Atlantis with the corresponding public version of Atlantis. Not anymore. The "Help | Check for Updates..." dialog of the beta versions now suggests such a move.

4) Finally, the "Help | Check for Updates..." dialog of public versions of Atlantis now informs you about any new beta versions of Atlantis:

All the changes mentioned in this post apply to builds of Atlantis released after December 18, 2009.

Perfectionism in action

2009-12-17T06:45:00.004-05:00

Many will find this trivial. It is a cosmetic improvement indeed which many would not even notice. But this post is meant to show that we do pay attention to details. Minor inconveniences are still inconveniences. Minor glitches are still glitches. No matter how small is a problem, it is always better to fix it than to live with it.

So what is that improvement? As you most probably know, when you place the mouse pointer over a hyperlink in a document of Atlantis, a popup hint is displayed with the hyperlink address. Previously, the popup hint slowly followed the mouse pointer as you moved the mouse pointer over the hyperlink:

Such "walking" hints served no actual purpose. In the next version of Atlantis, starting from Atlantis 1.6.5 currently under betatesting, these popup hints will remain at their initial location. Like this:

Tweaking ePubs (4): Choosing a text editor

2009-12-16T06:18:00.003-05:00

We discussed earlier in this blog the tweak_epub utility that you can use to make minor changes to EPUB files. This utility automatically used the standard Windows text editor Notepad to edit the files contained in EPUB packages.

A number of people using this utility said they would like to be able to choose a different text editor. This is now possible in the new version of the tweak_epub utility. Click this link if you want to download it:

http://www.AtlantisWordProcessor.com/download/tweak_epub.exe

When you run the updated utility, you'll see a new button, "Choose Editor...":

Press this button to choose another text editor. Note that you have to select the executable file of the text editor. Executable files have the ".exe" extension. For example, the executable file of the Windows Notepad editor is "notepad.exe".

Release of Atlantis 1.6.5 (beta)

2009-12-15T10:50:00.001-05:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5 is now available for betatesting.

You can download this new version of Atlantis from the Betatesting page.

Keep those hands on the keyboard (4): The Alt+NNN method

2009-12-14T13:50:00.003-05:00

As you probably already know, there are many ways to insert symbols in documents in Atlantis.

If you can remember the numbers assigned to specific symbols in the Unicode standard, inserting a symbol in a document in Atlantis is most conveniently done with the Alt+NNN method:

1. First, toggle the keyboard Num Lock key on.
2. Press and hold the Alt key down,
3. Type the Unicode number of the symbol on the numeric pad of the keyboard.
4. Release the Alt key.

Here are a few symbols that you might find useful:

Let's suppose that you want to insert a "numero sign". All you need to do is press and hold the Alt key down, type 8470 on the numeric pad, and release the Alt key. Atlantis will automatically insert the corresponding symbol from the most appropriate font.

Of course, any other Unicode symbol can be inserted with this Alt+NNN method. The Unicode numbers of symbols are shown in the "Insert | Symbol..." dialog of Atlantis.

Document formats: Winter cleaning

2009-12-11T12:39:00.008-05:00

Besides support for a new document format ODF, the upcoming version of Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5 will also include changes to its import/export filters.

Atlantis previously offered two separate formats for MS Word DOC documents through its Open/Save dialogs:

Indeed there is a significant difference between the DOC format used by MS Word 6.0/95 and the DOC format of higher versions of MS Word starting Word 97. But since the DOC format of MS Word 6.0/95 is now 15 year old, and it is hardly ever required by users, we decided to merge the two DOC formats into one in the list of supported document types:

What does this actually mean to Atlantis users?

Atlantis will still be able to open any DOC document of MS Word 6.0 (or higher). But saving DOCs in the old format of MS Word 6.0/95 won’t be possible anymore. If you open a DOC file of older format in Atlantis, and resave it in Atlantis, it will automatically be saved in the newer DOC format of MS Word 97 (and higher).

Atlantis 1.6.5 will also show a minor improvement to the Save as eBook feature. Previous versions of Atlantis saved superscripted and subscripted texts to eBooks with vertical offset only, without reducing the font size of these super-/subscripted texts:

Atlantis 1.6.5 will now apply a reduced font size to super-/subscripted texts:

In this way, the resulting EPUB file will mimic the look of super-/subscripted texts from the original document in the best possible manner.

OpenDocument in the pipeline

2009-12-05T17:17:00.004-05:00

We are currently working to implement support for the OpenDocument (ODF) format in Atlantis. This document format is supported by a number of word processing applications. But it is mainly linked to the OpenOffice.org office suite.

The ODF format can be used to store not only text documents but also spreadsheets, presentations, etc. Since Atlantis is a word processor, it will obviously only be concerned with text documents in the ODF format. Text documents in the ODF format normally have the ".odt" file extension.

So how comprehensive will ODF support be in Atlantis?

At this point we will not be adding ODF export capability to Atlantis.

What does this mean to Atlantis users?

Atlantis will open and display existing ODF documents, but you won't be able to create or re-save ODF documents as such in Atlantis. In other words, you'll be able to modify the contents of existing ODF documents, but you'll have to re-save the changed documents in any other document format supported by Atlantis, namely the RTF, DOC or DOCX format.

You might wonder why Atlantis won't save documents in the ODF format.

There is a single reason to this: the ODF document model is incompatible with the document model used in Atlantis.

Many word processing features work very differently in OpenOffice.org Writer (the word processor from the OpenOffice.org suite) from the way they do in Atlantis. For example, support for automatic lists, tables of contents, headers & footers, newspaper columns, and especially document sections and fields in Atlantis and OpenOffice Writer has been implemented quite differently.

Will Atlantis be able to open (i.e. import) ODF documents at all? Yes, because there are ways to convert the "incompatible content" of most ODF documents to an Atlantis-friendly format. Quite tricky transformations of the original content will have to be performed in order to convert some ODF features into elements that Atlantis can deal with. Some of the original elements and formatting of the ODF documents will be replaced with similar elements and formatting available in Atlantis so that when opened in Atlantis, ODF documents will look as closely as possible to how they look in OpenOffice Writer. In this way, you'll be able to open any ODF document in Atlantis, copy its contents and insert them into "Atlantis-friendly" documents.

You might say "if there are tricks to convert any ODF document to the Atlantis internal format, why not implement similar tricks to convert Atlantis documents to the ODF format?” From a solely technical point, this would be possible. But from a practical point, this does not make much sense.

Let's imagine that Atlantis is capable of saving documents in the ODF format (i.e. it can export to the ODF format). Each time you save an Atlantis document as ODF, Atlantis internally changes its document elements and structure to make them compatible with the ODF format. Such a transformation entails losing some of the original Atlantis formatting and structure. If you reopen such an "Atlantis-exported" ODF file in Atlantis, a new internal conversion of format has to be performed once more towards an "Atlantis-friendly" format. Such repeated conversions of internal format inevitably entail loss and distortion of information. Consequently, it will be impossible for Atlantis to reproduce the exact state in which original documents were before they were saved as ODF. Atlantis users will ineluctably be surprised at the way the documents they "saved as ODF" actually will look when reopened in Atlantis: with different formatting in many cases!

This is how we currently see things. But we might reconsider our decision if Atlantis users interested in the ODF format still think that ODF export might be useful to them.

A new version of Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5 with ODF import support (the "Open ODF document" feature) will soon be available for betatesting. Your comments and test documents regarding this feature will be most welcome. Plus we are open to discussing implementation of ODF export capability in Atlantis.

Release of Atlantis 1.6.4.3

2009-11-30T05:15:00.001-05:00

Atlantis 1.6.4.3 was under betatesting for a month. And now this version of Atlantis is available as a public release.

You can find the complete list of new features and changes in this version of Atlantis by clicking here.

As always, there are multiple ways to upgrade your copy of Atlantis Word Processor to the latest version.

Keep those hands on the keyboard (3): Fast dialoguing

2009-11-27T14:34:00.016-05:00

From time to time Atlantis pops up various windows that will not go away until you "talk" to them. You have to reply to the questions asked in these windows, choose some options, etc. These windows are called modal dialogs, or simply dialogs.

Many menu commands of Atlantis display dialogs when they are activated. You can easily tell when a menu command will open a dialog: its menu caption ends with an ellipsis (3 dots). For example, this is the case with most commands in the "Insert" menu:

A typical dialog has "OK" and "Cancel" buttons in the right bottom corner, plus a cross button on the title bar:

Clicking the "OK" button registers the changes that you have made in the dialog. The "Cancel" button obviously discards any changes. Clicking the cross button is equivalent to pressing the "Cancel" button.

Of course, any of these three buttons can be clicked with the mouse. But you can also "click" them from the keyboard.

Let's start with the "OK" button. It initially displays with a thicker border:

This means that the "OK" button is the "default button" of this dialog. A "default button" can be "clicked" by pressing the Enter key. So when you need to click the "OK" button in a dialog, you can simply press Enter. Note that this works only when the "OK" button has a special thicker border around it.

"Clicking" the "Cancel" button from the keyboard is also extremely easy. You only have to press the Esc key to close the dialog and cancel all the changes made in it.

Now here are more ways you can communicate with dialogs through the keyboard. Let's take the "Tools | Options..." dialog as an example:

* When a dialog has multiple tabs, as the "Tools | Options..." dialog:

switching over to the next tab is done by pressing Ctrl+Tab. And again repeatedly until you reach the appropriate tab.

* In most cases, one of the controls (GUI elements) of a dialog is focused (ie has the input focus). This means that you can interact with the focused element through the keyboard.

How do you find out which of the dialog elements is focused?

Focused buttons have a dotted rectangle around them:

And so have check or "tick" boxes:

When a button is focused, you can press the Space bar or the Enter key to run the corresponding command.

When a checkbox is focused, pressing the Space bar checks or unchecks the box, and hence activates or inactivates the corresponding option.

Text edit boxes can also be focused. In the absence of a selection, focused edit boxes display a blinking caret:

and any selection with a special color:

So whenever an edit box is focused, the text in it behaves pretty much like any editable text in the document window.

You can use the arrow keys to select its text or just move the blinking caret within the box.
You can press Ctrl+C to copy the edit box selection to the clipboard, or Ctrl+V to paste the clipboard text into the edit box.
You can press Del or the Backspace key to remove any selection within the edit box.
In the absence of a selection, the Backspace key allows you to erase one character at a time, going backwards.
And obviously, you can also type text directly into the focused edit box.

Focused boxes with attached drop-down lists display with a special background color:

or with a dotted rectangle:

When such a drop-down box is focused, you can use the arrow keys to cycle through the list items. You can also press Alt+Down Arrow to display the whole drop down list, and again cycle through the list items with the arrow keys:

When focused, ordinary list boxes display a dotted rectangle around the selected item:

When such a list box is focused, you can also use the arrow keys to cycle through the list items.

* Dialog elements become focused when you click them with the mouse. But you can also press the Tab key to switch focus from one dialog element to another. Pressing the Tab key repeatedly takes you from one element to the next until the desired element becomes focused.

* Most dialog elements have associated keyboard accelerators. If you press the Alt key in any dialog of Atlantis, you will notice underlined letters within most captions:

If you maintain the Alt key down and press the corresponding letter keys, you will "click" the corresponding element of a dialog. In other words, you will either

focus the related list,
check or uncheck the associated option,
or actually press the target button.

For example, pressing Alt+Z when the above dialog is showing is the same as clicking its "Font Sizes..." button.

Keep those hands on the keyboard (2): Zoom, spellcheck, and switch back

2009-11-25T04:01:00.005-05:00

Using keyboard instead of mouse can be a productivity booster for any writer. Here are more keyboard tips concerning Atlantis.

* Predefined zooming types and factors have dedicated hot keys:

Ctrl+Shift+K,P activates the "Page width" display.
Ctrl+Shift+K,T triggers the "Text width" zoom.
Ctrl+Shift+K,1 and Ctrl+Shift+K,2 respectively enable the "Whole pages" and "Two pages" zoom types.
The standard 100% zooming factor also has a dedicated hot key: Ctrl+Shift+K,0.

The zooming factor can be modified incrementally by 10%.

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Up Arrow increases the zooming factor by 10%.
Zooming in is also achieved by pressing the Ctrl key in combination with the Plus key (on the numeric pad).

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Down Arrow decreases the zooming factor by 10%.
Zooming out is also achieved by pressing the Ctrl key in combination with the Minus key (on the numeric pad).

* When we encounter a misspelt red-underlined word in a document, most of us usually grab the mouse and right-click the word for a list of suggestions from the spellchecker:

If one of the suggestions is appropriate, a click on it fixes the misspelling.

However, you might find it quite inconvenient to have to turn to the mouse each time you want to have a look at the list of spelling suggestions. No problem! You can display the spellchecker suggestions from the keyboard. Just place the insertion cursor within the misspelt word (or immediately after its last letter), and press the Menu key on your keyboard to display the spellchecker suggestions for the currently red-underlined word.

The Menu key looks like this:

* When we are working on a document, we quite often need to navigate from one location to another, and back within the same document. This happens for example when we want to paste a copy of a text fragment located further down in the document. In such cases we usually scroll the document window down till we reach our target, select the text to copy, send it to the Windows clipboard with Ctrl+C, and finally scroll back up to the original location, where we can paste the copied text with Ctrl+V.

Undoubtedly, the whole rigmarole is quite tedious and cumbersome, especially when the document is very long. This is why Atlantis has the F5 hot key to take you back to the place where you last made a change to the current document. So after you’ve placed the selection of text on the Windows clipboard, all you need to do to go back to your starting point is to press the F5 key. Voilà!

More keyboard tips still to follow soon...

Keep those hands on the keyboard: You're not old hat, – you're smart!

2009-11-21T06:10:00.015-05:00

In the MS-DOS era, not every PC was equipped with a mouse, and users interacted with applications mainly through the keyboard. But nowadays it is hard to imagine a modern PC without mouse input. Most operations can be done through the mouse, and some – exclusively through the mouse.

So why bother memorizing keyboard shortcuts if the mouse is so convenient? Simply because every time you take your hands off the keyboard, you slow yourself down! Keep those hands on the keyboard and off of your mouse. It is faster that way!

Plenty can be done in Atlantis from the keyboard only, including the press of a button or the selection of a menu item.

You can assign shortcuts

to nearly any Atlantis command using the "Tools | Hot Keys..." dialog,
to paragraph styles from the "Format | Style..." window,
to special symbols in the "Insert | Symbol..." panel

so that you can launch actions, apply style to paragraphs, insert special symbols directly from the keyboard.

Now here are less obvious ways to perform familiar actions through the keyboard.

* Of course, you can click a button on the Atlantis document bar to switch to another document. But the same can be achieved by pressing any Alt+N combination, N being the number assigned to the document on the bar. Alt+1 switches to the first open document (leftmost button), Alt+2 switches to the second open document (next button), and so on. Pressing Alt+0 (zero on the main keyboard) shows the complete list of all open documents. The arrow keys select the target document, the Enter key brings the document up.

Cycling through the open documents can also be done by pressing Ctrl+Tab.

* The Atlantis toolbars include 3 boxes to apply Style, Font, and Font size to text:

Each of these boxes can be accessed from the keyboard.

Ctrl+Shift+F brings up the Font box:

You can type the required font name in, then press Enter. Or use the arrow keys to select a font name in the list, then press Enter. The font will immediately be applied to the current text in the document window.

Similarly, the Font size box opens with Ctrl+Shift+P. You can type the required font size in, then press Enter. Or use the arrow keys to select a font size from the list, then press Enter. The font size will immediately be applied to the current text in the document window.

Same thing with the Styles box. Ctrl+Shift+S opens the drop-down. You can type the required style name in, then press Enter. Or use the arrow keys to select a style from the list, then press Enter. The style will immediately be applied to the current text in the document window.

* To access any menu command of Atlantis, you only need to remember the simplest of shortcuts: the Alt key.

Normally the main menu of Atlantis looks in this way:

But if you press the Alt key (or its counterpart from the MS DOS age – F10), some of the menu caption letters will be underlined:

When these underlined letters are displayed, Atlantis is in the menu mode: you can use the keyboard to navigate among menu commands, and invoke them.

Actually, there are two ways to navigate among the menu commands with the keyboard.

First, you can use the arrows keys.

Second, you can type any one of the underlined letters to activate the associated menu item. For example, a press on the F key opens the File menu:

Pressing any letter underlined in one of the File menu items invokes the corresponding dialog. For example, the Print... command is executed by typing the letter P.

This is why these underlined letters are sometimes called "accelerator keys".

Atlantis allows you to customize which character should be underlined in its menu captions and act as its accelerator keys. This is done in the Tools | Menus... dialog with a press of the Rename... button:

You will notice that most menu names display an additional ampersand character:

This ampersand character is not actually displayed in the Atlantis GUI. It simply means that the letter next to it will be underlined in the corresponding menu caption, and will act as its accelerator key. In the above example, the ampersand only indicates that the "N" letter will be underlined and will act as the accelerator key to the New command of the File menu.

So you can assign any suitable accelerator key to a menu item in this way: simply rename the menu item and place an ampersand character before the letter that you want to act as its accelerator key.

... More "keyboard vs mouse" tips to follow soon.

Open dashes vs Closed dashes

2009-11-18T04:24:00.009-05:00

It is hard to find another punctuation mark in English language that has so many different uses and fuels so many debates among writers and philologists as dashes. So we are not going to start a discussion on the use of dashes. So much has already been said it would be hard to add anything new. If you are interested, Wikipedia has plenty of detailed information on the use of dashes.

But we still have information relevant to Atlantis. The new minor version of Atlantis Word Processor (– 1.6.4.3 –) currently under betatesting introduces a change in the way Atlantis handles dashes.

As you most probably know, Atlantis has two special symbols called "Short dash" (or "En dash") and "Long dash" (or "Em Dash"). They can be inserted using the "Insert | Symbol..." dialog:

or by pressing the associated hot keys: Ctrl+Alt+– and Ctrl+-.

These dashes can also be inserted in your documents by AutoCorrect. For example, AutoCorrect will by default replace two hyphens (--) with an En dash on-the-fly, – as you type them.

As you know, Atlantis systematically adds missing spaces, or removes spare spaces before/after most punctuation signs according to the standard rules. But Atlantis also allows you to change these rules to suit your own preferences. When you press the "Rules..." button in the "Tools | AutoCorrect Options..." dialog:

the "Smart Space Management" window is displayed where you can customize which punctuation signs require space before or after:

Now about dashes. They can be either "open" or "closed".

"Open" dashes have space characters around them, like this:

He was quick to declare victory — maybe too quick.

"Closed" dashes do not have spaces before and after them:

He was quick to declare victory—maybe too quick.

"Open" dashes was always the default option in Atlantis. By this we mean that Atlantis systematically added space characters around dashes if it found them missing. And the "Smart Space Management" dialog did not allow end-users to change this behavior and control spacing around dashes. In other words, "closed" dashes were not accepted by Atlantis. This has been corrected in the upcoming version. In Atlantis 1.6.4.3, you will be able to specify "closed" dashes as an accepted behavior by Atlantis. "Open" dashes will still be the default option on install. But you'll be able to remove dashes from the list of punctuation signs requiring space before and after if it suits you better. Simply select the dashes in the "Smart Space Management" window:

and press Del. After that, Atlantis won't attempt to add spaces around dashes if you don't type them in yourself.

As always, this latest beta version of Atlantis Word Processor is available from the Betatesting page.

Optimizing PNG images

2009-11-13T04:28:00.004-05:00

You might say "Who cares about file size nowadays? Modern PCs have hard disks with zillions of bytes of capacity. Why bother with file size optimization?"

It is true that modern hard disks have a much larger capacity than, let's say, 15 years ago when a 1 GB hard disk was considered a luxury. Today even USB flash drives have a larger capacity. But there are cases when file size really matters.

It might be the case if you run a Web site. In most cases, you've subscribed to only a limited monthly bandwidth. Now if your site has only a few visitors a day, probably your bandwidth limit is irrelevant. It will hardly be ever exceeded. But if your site has hundreds or thousands of visitors a day, the weight of your files might be critical. Let's suppose that your site harbors a 1 MB picture. If it gets viewed 100 times, this will add 100 MB to the traffic of your site. 1,000 views will generate an extra gigabyte of traffic. What if it gets viewed 10,000 or even more times? It isn't hard to imagine how many gigabytes of your allowed bandwidth will be eaten up. This is why optimizing graphic files saves site traffic. This in turn might allow you to switch to a cheaper Web hosting plan and save you money. Optimized pictures will also load faster in your visitors' Web browsers, and browsing your site will be all the more pleasant.

Having optimized graphic files in the eBooks or documents you create might also be important to spare download time to readers.

Now how can you optimize picture size?

Pictures already included in documents can be optimized in Atlantis by reducing their quality. But graphic files can also be optimized directly on your hard disk using OptiPNG by Cosmin Truţa. This free utility shrinks PNG image files (PNG being one of the most popular image formats among Web site designers). OptiPNG performs lossless optimization of PNG files, plus it can convert images in other formats (BMP, GIF, etc) to optimized PNG.

OptiPNG is a command-line (console) application for Windows. You can download it directly from its home site:

http://optipng.sourceforge.net/

But there is a more convenient way to use this utility. A special setup file of OptiPNG created by Dmitry Vlasko not only installs OptiPNG on your system, but also integrates it into the Windows shell. Pictures can then be optimized directly in Windows Explorer by right-clicking their filenames. You'll find this setup file at the OptiPNG Windows shell integration home page.

Here are full instructions on how to install and use this utility:

Click the following link to download the SetupOptiPNG.rar compressed file:

http://dms-journal.ho.ua/storage/software/OptiPNG/SetupOptiPNG.rar

Then extract SetupOptiPNG.msi from SetupOptiPNG.rar, run it, and follow the onscreen instructions.

To adjust the OptiPNG settings, use the "Start > Programs > OptiPNG Settings" shortcut.

To optimize any PNG image on your hard disk, right-click it in Windows Explorer, and choose the "OptiPNG: default profile" menu command:

What could be more convenient?

What's under the hood: Supercompact RTFs

2009-11-09T14:51:00.008-05:00

Have you ever wondered what are those "supercompact RTFs" enabled by default in the "Tools | Options..." window of Atlantis?

Are there two flavors of the RTF format?

Not actually. There is a single Rich Text Format standard from Microsoft. But RTF files can be generated differently.

To begin with, any RTF document generated by Atlantis, is a valid RTF file compliant with the RTF specification. But this specification allows some document elements to be saved in multiple different but still valid ways. Atlantis simply exploits the possibilities offered by the RTF specification to generate smaller RTF files.

You might wonder why then offer to save "non-supercompact" RTFs if "supercompact" RTFs are always smaller than their "traditional" counterparts? The answer is very simple: not every word processing application supports all the features of the RTF specification. Consequently not every software can display supercompact RTFs correctly. Luckily, this mainly applies to older word processors. All major modern word processors (including MS Word and OpenOffice) display the supercompact RTFs of Atlantis as intended. So you might need to uncheck the "Save supercompact RTF documents" option in Atlantis only if you are going to send your RTF documents to someone whose word processor cannot display supercompact RTFs correctly.

OK, then what's exactly the difference between "supercompact RTFs" and "non-supercompact RTFs"? If you need technical details, here they are:

1) A paragraph in traditional RTFs is normally terminated by a sequence of 6 characters (bytes):

\par<carriage_return><line_feed>

"<carriage_return><line_feed>" (or CR/LF - two bytes with codes 13 and 10) is a standard combination terminating any line in most plain text files in Windows.

A paragraph in supercompact RTFs is terminated by 2 characters (bytes) only:

\<carriage_return>

You save 4 bytes per paragraph if you save the document as supercompact.

2) Most non-English characters in traditional RTFs are stored in a 4-byte format:

\'<NN>

<NN> is a two-byte character code in hexadecimal format.

In supercompact RTFs, such characters are normally saved as a single byte containing the ANSI code of a character.

For example, the "é" letter (e-acute) is saved to traditional RTFs as

\'e9

This "é" letter is stored within supercompact RTFs as a single byte with code 233.

So, you save 3 bytes per a non-English character if you save as supercompact.

3) Finally, a difference which makes supercompact files really a useful option.

Pictures are always stored in traditional RTFs as Windows metafiles.

In supercompact RTFs, pictures are stored as PNGs or JPEGs.

In most cases, metafiles are much bigger than their counterparts in the PNG or JPEG format. Have I said "much bigger"? I actually wanted to say "MUCH-MUCH bigger". A tenfold difference in size between the metafile and PNG versions of the same picture is a completely normal thing.

So if your RTF document contains pictures, you can DRAMATICALLY shrink its file size by saving as supercompact RTF.

Tweaking ePubs (3): Page margins

2009-11-06T06:05:00.002-05:00

More tips on what you might need to adjust in your EPUB files generated by Atlantis.

Any Atlantis EPUB contains a CSS file with the book formatting. You can view/edit this CSS file with the tweak_epub utility:

The first line of this style.css normally contains this text:

By modifying numbers in this line, you can control page margins of your book:

Tweaking ePubs (2): Metadata

2009-11-04T04:27:00.006-05:00

You already know how to make adjustments to existing EPUB files.

So what you might need to change in EPUBs generated by Atlantis?

Sometimes authors need to add extra metadata to their EPUBs. Metadata is stored within the file with .opf extension. If you open any Atlantis EPUB with the tweak_epub utility (or with any ZIP software), you will find a file called "content.opf" under the "Ops" folder:

This file contains a separate section with metadata:

On the above screen capture, the EPUB file contains 5 metadata items: title, creator, date, identifier, and language. When you save a document as eBook in Atlantis, you can instruct Atlantis to add more metadata items to the book's content.opf file by specifying the corresponding "basic information" about your book in the "Save as eBook" window:

But you might still need to add metadata not supported by the "Save as eBook" window of Atlantis. In such cases you could add it manually to content.opf. For example, you could add a "book genre" metadata to your EPUB:

You can find more information on EPUB metadata in the corresponding section of the EPUB specification.

Tweaking ePubs: It's just a ZIP file!

2009-11-02T15:28:00.008-05:00

Did you know that any eBook in the EPUB format is just a ZIP file but with the .epub file extension? EPUBs normally contain multiple files in different formats: XHTML, XML, JPG, etc. If you rename any .epub file to .zip, you can open it in any file compression software.

Since Atlantis automatically generates all the required EPUB components, and puts them into a ZIP file in the proper order, you do not necessarily need to know what's inside your EPUB books generated by Atlantis. But if you are familiar with the EPUB specification, at times you might need to make minor adjustments to your EPUBs not possible directly through the GUI of Atlantis.

So how to modify individual files within the EPUB package?

Since EPUBs are actually ordinary ZIP files, you can change their file extension to .zip, and open in your ZIP software. Then extract files of interest, modify them in a text editor, and put back in the ZIP file. File extension has to be changed back to .epub.

But there is one important detail to remember when you modify an EPUB file in a ZIP software. The first file in any proper EPUB package must be "mimetype". It is always a 20-byte ASCII file containing this string of text:

application/epub+zip

Even more, this file must be always stored within the EPUB package in uncompressed form.

So before tweaking your EPUB files with a ZIP software, you should be sure that it will preserve the original order of files, and leave the "mimetype" file uncompressed. Not every ZIP software will allow such "delicate" changes to a ZIP file.

But we can suggest an alternative solution to EPUB tweaking. The tweak_epub utility will allow you to adjust any text file from an EPUB package in a quite convenient way. You can download this utility from our site. Just click the following link:

http://www.AtlantisWordProcessor.com/download/tweak_epub.exe

and download a small file "tweak_epub.exe" (~100 KB) to any folder on your hard disk.

This utility does not require installation. Just run this "tweak_epub.exe" whenever you need to tweak an EPUB file.

It will display the "Open EPUB" window:

Direct it to the EPUB file of interest, and click "Open".

It will display another window with a complete list of files contained within your EPUB:

Click a file that you would like to modify (on the below screen capture – a file with CSS styles), then the "Edit File..." button:

The selected file will be opened in Notepad:

When you are done with editing this file, click the cross button in the title bar of Notepad, or press Alt+F4. You will get a confirmation message from Notepad:

Click "Yes" if you want to save changes.

The "Save Changes" button of the "tweak_epub" utility will become enabled:

You can click this button to complete editing the EPUB file, and save all the modified text files back to the EPUB package. Of course, you can always click the "Cancel Changes" button if you do not want to save changes to the EPUB file.

By the way, it is recommended to make a copy of the original EPUB file before tweaking it. Just in case you make an editing mistake.

Your first eBook

2009-11-01T03:20:00.002-05:00

Have you ever dreamed of writing a book of your own? Even more, have you ever dreamed of writing for a living?

If you don't know how and where to start, below you'll find a compilation of links to websites with tips on planning, writing, promoting, and selling eBooks:

Writing your first book
Guide to writing your first book
Writing your first eBook
How to write eBooks that people actually want to buy
How to make money writing eBooks
How to write an eBook to sell on the Internet
How to advertise an eBook

Good luck!

Release of Atlantis 1.6.4.3 (beta)

2009-10-30T15:36:00.002-04:00

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.4.3 is now available for betatesting.

Though all the new features of this version of Atlantis have been mentioned in this blog, you may wish to check out the complete list of changes.

You can download this new version of Atlantis from the Betatesting page of the Atlantis site.

As always, your feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Validating ePubs

2009-10-29T05:37:00.005-04:00

Any eBook generated by Atlantis, is supposed to be compliant with the EPUB standards (yes, EPUB is not one standard but three: Open Publication Structure, Open Packaging Format and Open Container Format).

But if you manually tweak EPUBs created by Atlantis, or you use another tool to create eBooks in the EPUB format, it may be a good idea to validate them before publishing or sending to anyone. Even if your eBook displays correctly in all major eBook readers, some publishers would not accept it if it does not pass the validation check.

So how to make sure that your eBook is a 100% valid EPUB file? It's simple. You can do this online with the tool offered by Threepress Consulting Inc. Just click the following link:

http://www.threepress.org/document/epub-validate

then upload an EPUB file from your disk, and click "Validate".

If there are problems with your EPUB file, the validation tool will tell you which files from the EPUB package need to be corrected.

But with any EPUB file generated by Atlantis, you should always get this nice icon:

eBook creation: still polishing

2009-10-27T15:33:00.015-04:00

The Overlong sentences will not be the only new feature in the upcoming minor version of Atlantis 1.6.4.3. There will be a number of improvements to the Save as eBook feature as well:

1) Atlantis will save cover images for eBooks in a better way. There will be less blank space around cover images when viewed in eBook readers. For example, here is how the eBook.rtf template of Atlantis looks in Adobe Digital Editions when saved as eBook with different versions of Atlantis (click to enlarge):

2) Atlantis will divide the book's content into separate HTML files in a smarter way. It will try to reduce the number of HTML files within the ePub package. The book will be rendered by eBook readers with less unintended page breaks. If the source document is not very long, there will be no unintended page breaks at all.

3) Atlantis will automatically retrieve the author's surname from the content of the "Author" box of the "Save as eBook" window:

and generate a new metadata field within the "content.opf" file:

This "opf:file-as" field is used to sort books by author.

4) If your source document contains footnotes or endnotes, automatic numbers within notes of the eBook will be clickable:

Clicking these numbers will bring you to the corresponding note references within the main text of the eBook.

About Windows, birds and mice

2009-10-22T23:24:00.001-04:00

Windows 7 has arrived.

Some people say that the new Windows is just a polished version of Vista, some (including Microsoft) say it's a completely new operating system.

Some believe that Windows 7 will be a blockbuster, some doubt that it will be as successful as Windows XP.

Only time will tell whether those expectations turn out to be real.

Some say that the early bird gets the worm, and they already have Windows 7. Some say that the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap, and they will wait until the dust settles down.

Whichever saying you prefer, and whichever version of Windows you are running, you will probably be glad to hear that one more Windows version has been added to the list of operating systems supported by Atlantis. Yes, Atlantis Word Processor runs on all Windows versions from Windows 95 through Windows 7.

Windows Vista, or Where is my choice?

2009-10-21T21:55:00.003-04:00

If you are among the 18% of computer users who run Windows Vista on their systems, or if you already have Windows 7, this information is meant for you.

What do you normally do when you notice a red-underlined misspelt word in your Atlantis document? Yes, you right-click it for the list of suggestions from the spellchecker. Well, you can always correct the misspelt word manually, but most users prefer instead to choose a proper replacement from the list.

In some cases, Atlantis offers a single replacement for the right-clicked misspelt word. But quite often the list of spellcheck suggestions contains multiple items if they all seem to be highly probable replacements, as for the Atlantis spellchecker.

The problem is that the menu with spellcheck suggestions always contains only one item if you run Atlantis under Vista (or Windows 7). As a result of this Vista-specific glitch in the recent versions of Atlantis (including the current public version of Atlantis 1.6.4.2), you never get proper replacements for some misspelt words in your documents. In such cases, you are left with no choice but to correct a misspelt word manually.

This glitch will be fixed in the upcoming version of Atlantis 1.6.4.3.

Thanks again to our user Michael Speir for discovering this glitch and reporting it to us.

"Delay, or not delay - that is the question"

2009-10-19T23:45:00.008-04:00

If you have Atlantis Word Processor version 1.6.2.0 through 1.6.4.2, you probably noticed that Atlantis freezes for a few seconds (on slower computers for up to 10 seconds) after you start typing text. (By the way, you can find out the version of your Atlantis by choosing the "Help | About..." menu command.)

Some users don't see a problem with having this delay in Atlantis (it happens only once per session). But some were quite annoyed by it, especially those who have slower PCs.

So what causes this delay? Atlantis version 1.6.2.0 (and higher) has a big module dealing with the inflected forms of English words. This module is stored in a compressed form within the executable file of Atlantis. When Atlantis needs this module, it has to load and decompress a large amount of data. This takes time even on a fast system. Two features of Atlantis - Overused Words and Power Type - need information about inflected forms. When you start typing in Atlantis, the Power Type feature is launched, and Atlantis starts loading inflected forms. This is why there is a delay.

But we didn't want just to explain why you have this delay. We came up with a solution which will improve things significantly.

Any next version of Atlantis (1.6.4.3 or higher) won't decompress the module with inflected forms every time you launch Atlantis and start typing. It will do this only once after you install or upgrade Atlantis. Decompressed data will be saved to a special file under the home folder of Atlantis (don't be surprised if you find a new file with a .tmp extension there). After a restart, Atlantis would load this file in a fraction of second. So you could say bye-bye to the delay that annoyed you. Well, if it didn't annoy you, you could still say bye-bye to it. :)

Keep it short

2009-10-16T13:11:00.022-04:00

As you most probably know, Atlantis has the "Overused Words" feature which helps creative writers avoid repetitions and clichés because any writer knows that he should avoid them if he wants his texts to be read with any interest or pleasure because overused words are simply boring and will invariably put readers off, whether these "tired" words belong to the common stock of catch phrases used by most people, or to the writer's own idiosyncratic style, and no one will be interested to read such boring texts because there are more interesting things to spend time on.

You can immediately say what's wrong with the above sentence (yes, it's one sentence). Its main problem is that it's TOO LONG.

Overlong sentences tend to be very boring and confusing to read. They can easily prevent your reader from understanding what you want to say. This is why overlong sentences should be also avoided.

Of course, Atlantis could not automatically fix overlong sentences by dividing them into shorter and clearer sentences. It's not that smart (yet). :) But you asked for a feature that would report overlong sentences (remember, you can request features through the Atlantis Forum?). And you'll have it.

A new tab will be added to the "Tools | Overused Words..." window of Atlantis:

It has a single edit box where you can control how many words per sentence is "too much".

Plus it has only two buttons "Previous" and "Next". Clicking these buttons will highlight overlong sentences in the active document. You could then rework reported sentences in any way you want.

It's that simple.

A beta version of Atlantis with this new feature will be available for download from the Betatesting page of the Atlantis site in the next few days.

Last "big" format

2009-10-13T23:06:00.003-04:00

Since the first public release of Atlantis in 2000 (oh, how time flies!), our priority was to have the best possible support for document formats of MS Word. The prerelease of Atlantis (version 0.7) was able both to import (open) and export (save) documents in the Rich Text Format (RTF) developed by Microsoft. It also supported opening DOC files of MS Word 6.0 and higher. Atlantis 1.1.1 (released in 2002) was capable of saving DOC files. Finally, the latest version of Atlantis can both open and save documents in the DOCX format.

But now we are considering to add support for one more major document format in one of the nearest releases of Atlantis. As you might have guessed, that new format is ODT (or OpenDocument), a native document format of OpenOffice. This document format is quite popular, plus it is now an ISO standard. After all, the fact that Microsoft had to add support for this document format to Word 2007 means a lot.

The good thing about ODT is that it is an open and well-documented format, though its documentation is not as comprehensive as the one of DOCX. The bad thing is that the ODT format is not fully compatible with the document models used in MS Word and Atlantis. As a result of this, a fully lossless conversion from ODT to RTF or DOC will not be always possible.

So probably you will be able to open ODT documents in Atlantis in a not too distant future.

What do experts say?

2009-10-12T08:58:00.002-04:00

It is always interesting and important to know what others think of your product. We greatly appreciate all the feedback from our users. It never fails to affect the development of Atlantis.

But of course we are also interested in the comments and reviews experts make in computer magazines and on software portals. This is why we've created a new page on our site dedicated to such reviews of Atlantis Word Processor. And although we might not agree with every statement made by the authors of these reviews, we understand that they will help new visitors of our site "to have a more complete picture".

By the way, if you've come across reviews of Atlantis Word Processor that are not mentioned on the dedicated page of our site, please let us know. We will add links to these reviews.

WordWeb Pro 6, or Bug fixing at a lightning speed

2009-10-11T17:12:00.003-04:00

If every problem was resolved that quickly, it would be a nearly perfect world...

You most probably know that Atlantis has a Thesaurus command. It is available in Atlantis if you have the WordWeb software on your PC. Most use this command as follows: they right-click a word in Atlantis, then choose the "Thesaurus..." command from the menu to display a WordWeb window with synonyms. This window normally has a "Replace" button. You click it to replace the current word in Atlantis with a synonym from WordWeb.

This is how things always worked. But a long-time Atlantis user Michael Speir has discovered a glitch in the latest paid version of WordWeb Pro 6. Right-clicking any document word in Atlantis, and choosing the "Thesaurus..." command from the menu still displayed a WordWeb window with synonyms. But there was no "Replace" button in this window anymore.

Michael has contacted the WordWeb developers on this issue, and Voilà: it is fixed! The patched version of WordWeb Pro was available for download from their site in hours! Not many software companies react on bug reports from customers that quickly.

So if you are using Atlantis + WordWeb Pro 6, and you get no "Replace" button in the thesaurus window, please know this glitch has been already fixed by the WordWeb programmers. You can now update your thesaurus. The version number of WordWeb Pro has gone from 6 to 6.0.