Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.4.3

Post by **admin** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 2:42 pm

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.4.3 is available for betatesting.

andygrunt · Post by **andygrunt** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 6:24 pm

Not had a chance to try the new version extensively but two initial observations...

I ran the new 'overlong sentences' on something I wrote in the last couple of days - turns out it was crammed full of long sentences, even more than I expected. I suspect that feature will come in very handy for me. Also, as soon as I tried it and the first sentence was highlighted, I thought it would be good if it reported the length of the selected sentence. Turns out it was already in there. For anyone else looking for it, it appears in the bottom, left of the main Atlantis window.

The other main feature I was looking forward to was the fix for the temporary freeze up but I'm not getting it. I still get the same sort of delay when I switch back to Atlantis after it's been minimised. Are there any settings I have to change to get the benefit?

Incidentally, I think any work done to speed up Atlantis is still worthwhile. I first looked for an alternative to Word for this very reason. I have an old, slow laptop and Word moves slower than a glacier and Atlantis zips along in comparison. Usually you'd say computers are getting faster all the time so no need to make it quicker but with low powered netbooks becoming very popular I'd suggest it's still worth working on.

Post by **admin** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 5:30 am

andygrunt wrote:The other main feature I was looking forward to was the fix for the temporary freeze up but I'm not getting it. I still get the same sort of delay when I switch back to Atlantis after it's been minimised. Are there any settings I have to change to get the benefit?

The new version of Atlantis addresses the issue discussed here:
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en ... php?t=1292

and here:
http://atlantiswordprocessor.blogspot.c ... stion.html

Note that there is still a freeze-up. But it occurs only once after you upgrade Atlantis, or make a fresh install of Atlantis. If you restart Atlantis, there should be no more delay.

Are you sure that minimizing Atlantis then restoring the window of Atlantis, causes a freeze-up of Atlantis?

Post by **admin** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 5:35 am

By the way, what is your CPU (type and speed)?

andygrunt · Post by **andygrunt** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 7:06 am

I may have spoken too soon. After firing up Atlantis today, it seems to be behaving itself with no sign of a delay. Perhaps I just needed to close it down after installation and restart it? Anyway, I'll keep an eye on it and let you know if the delay reappears.

To answer your question my laptop has a Pentium 4 2.2Ghz processor. It came with 512Mb RAM but I doubled that to 1Gb in the past few weeks. Atlantis has generally run very slickly except for that delay when I brought it back after doing other stuff (email, web etc). I'd maximise it and start to type but it would be hesitant, the odd letter appearing for a few seconds then all of the writing appearing at once after several seconds and then it would work fine.

As I say, so far today (after the same amount of experimentation as I tried yesterday), it seems to be working fine with no hesitation.

DoctorRob · Post by **DoctorRob** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 9:00 am

I too downloaded the new Beta (1.6.4.3), which seems so far to be running bug-free. Well done, guys. It's still a lean, fast programme.

I also ran the 'over-long sentences' feature, using the default setting of 25 words, on a short story of mine which is being published in a creative writing journal after passing peer review. It's also part of a collection which has been given a very favourable publisher's report.

I wasn't surprised that the tool highlighted a lot of sentences, or that the sentences seemed readable and musical, since I had worked hard to get them that way. I then imported a short story by Julian Barnes, recently published in /The New Yorker/, and again was not surprised that the tool identified a significant number of sentences as 'over-long'.

I think it should be stressed that tools like these can tell you how often you use the same word, or how often you use a long sentence, without really telling you how beautiful, or even how readable, your prose is. That is best done by reading your prose aloud, or asking someone else to read it. And I would be a bit concerned if creative writing students of mine were using such tools on their homework, and taking the results too seriously. Perhaps you should rely on human judgement more, andygrunt.

andygrunt · Post by **andygrunt** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 10:07 am

DoctorRob wrote: Perhaps you should rely on human judgement more, andygrunt.

Absolutely! Human judgement is, by far, my very favourite kind of judgement. Much better than all the animal and alien judgement I usually use

I don't mean to suggest that I think every sentence should be short but it just so happens that I have a particular bad habit of creating very long, meandering sentences by default (even worse than this one) that I have to consciously work to cut down. I also often seem to have a bit of a blind spot in seeing them hence my original suggestion for a tool within Atlantis to help point them out. That doesn't mean I will decide to always cut them down to below the 25 word length, just that it will help allow me make that creative decision.

My comment was meant to suggest how useful it appears to be even on a short piece of work where I didn't expect it to spot too many long sentences as I thought I'd spotted them all - there were loads I'd missed!

andygrunt · Post by **andygrunt** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 10:28 am

I notice I'm still getting a pause sometimes when I resume work in Atlantis but after spotting the occasional 'backing up' message and/or the little green floppy disk icon at the bottom of the window, I'm now wondering if it's got more to do with Atlantis saving and backing up than anything else? In Options, Load/Save I have 'Safeguard' set to 3 minutes and 'Backup Files' set to 15 minutes.

So, I'm guessing that when I minimise Atlantis then, later, maximise it and start typing, the first thing it does is notice it's overdue to do a save or 'safeguard' and spends a few seconds doing that. Does this sound feasible?

If so, perhaps you could amend it so it doesn't immediately save after being maximised and/or the user starts typing? I'd rather sacrifice the occasional backup (or delay it) than get the pause each time, just when I'm trying to get something down before it evaporates.

Andremusic · Post by **Andremusic** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 5:24 pm

After opening a cod file with the correct password, all I see are empty pages instead of the document text. Is this a bug or is the document corrupt?

Post by **admin** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 2:04 am

If the COD document is corrupt, your password will be rejected. There must be a different explanation for this. Are you sure that the document is blank?

Andremusic · Post by **Andremusic** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 4:52 am

admin wrote:If the COD document is corrupt, your password will be rejected. There must be a different explanation for this. Are you sure that the document is blank?

i tried it with another document that was protected as well, and it openend normally. The first document is 0 kb. Not sure why this is. I have the orignal documents of everything still burned on a cd so there is no loss. I was just wondering what was going on.

André

Post by **admin** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 5:29 am

Encrypted documents (CODs) cannot be blank. If a file's size is 0, Atlantis treats it as a plain text file. Atlantis never asks for a password if a file's size is 0.

Post by **admin** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 5:56 am

andygrunt wrote:I notice I'm still getting a pause sometimes when I resume work in Atlantis but after spotting the occasional 'backing up' message and/or the little green floppy disk icon at the bottom of the window, I'm now wondering if it's got more to do with Atlantis saving and backing up than anything else? In Options, Load/Save I have 'Safeguard' set to 3 minutes and 'Backup Files' set to 15 minutes.

So, I'm guessing that when I minimise Atlantis then, later, maximise it and start typing, the first thing it does is notice it's overdue to do a save or 'safeguard' and spends a few seconds doing that. Does this sound feasible?

If so, perhaps you could amend it so it doesn't immediately save after being maximised and/or the user starts typing? I'd rather sacrifice the occasional backup (or delay it) than get the pause each time, just when I'm trying to get something down before it evaporates.

A backup copy of a document is made by Atlantis when you make a change to this document, and the requested amount of time ("Tools | Options... > Load/Save > Backup Files... > Backup every N minute") has elapsed. Your document must be quite long if Atlantis stops responding for a few seconds.

I am not sure that delaying a backup would improve anything.

... I'd rather sacrifice the occasional backup ...

I suppose your Atlantis is configured to make backups "too often" on your system. Just instruct Atlantis to make backups less often (adjust the "Tools | Options... > Load/Save > Backup Files... > Backup every N minute" setting).

Another note. If the Backup folder of your Atlantis contains too many files, this might slow down backup creation. Please open the "Tools | Options... > Load/Save > Backup Files..." window of Atlantis, and click the "Browse Backup Folder..." button. Most probably you will find there plenty of subfolders with backups for various temporary/draft documents. If you do not need them, just remove entire folders with backups of individual documents. Alternatively please click the "Delete Backup Files..." button of the "Tools | Options... > Load/Save > Backup Files..." window, and remove spare backups.

By the way, you can use the following two options of the "Backup Files" dialog to control the performance of backup creation:

The less "max number of backups per document" and disk space for backups the faster backup creation.

andygrunt · Post by **andygrunt** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 7:19 am

admin wrote: A backup copy of a document is made by Atlantis when you make a change to this document, and the requested amount of time ("Tools | Options... > Load/Save > Backup Files... > Backup every N minute") has elapsed.

I'm pretty sure it's not quite acting that way.

I usually have 2 or 3 docs open at a time, most of them just a few pages long. The main one that's always open is bigger (773 Kilobytes) but I wouldn't have thought that counts as huge. Saving it doesn't seem to take very long i.e. the progress bar zips across in about half a second or less but I'm not sure if that's the complete extent of the saving progress or not (i.e. whether it does other stuff before or after the progress bar appears).

I'm in the habit of manually saving (CTRL+S) very often - after each sentence or two. I got into this habit as Atlantis occasionally (once a month ish) crashes on me (although it's rare to lose data). I certainly never minimise Atlantis without saving the doc I'm working on and yet, when I come back to it after doing something else, I often notice the doc gets saved immediately before I can start typing. I presume that it shouldn't save if there's been no changes to the doc and yet that's what often seems to be happening.

I'll try changing the save settings you mentioned and see if that helps although I'm puzzled why the number of saved files or the space used on the hard disk would affect how long an individual save would take. My current 'Backup Files' settings (in case it's of interest) are: save every 15 minutes, Max number of backup files for a document is 4 and the max amount of disk space to use for backup files is 200Mb (disk space currently used by the backups is 139.05Mb).