New features under development - wrapping text around images

We have some exciting news for our users.

Wrapping text around images and a number of other image-related features are in the works for Atlantis Word Processor, and should be available before the end of this year.

More details are available here.

New GUI of Atlantis Word Processor

In recent years we have made a lot of changes under the hood of Atlantis Word Processor.
Now the time has come for big changes to the look and feel of Atlantis.
Atlantis will soon have a new updated GUI. This is a preview of the upcoming version of Atlantis:
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/news/new_gui.htm

iPads and breaking pages for sure

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.

Portable fonts

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! :)

Last "big" format

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.