This release of Atlantis Word Processor introduces the Draft View mode, the Batch Conversion tool, plus a number of other features and changes. Please read on for details.

Draft View

Batch conversion

Previews in the Open/Save dialogs

Interpage gaps

Highlighting

Horizontal scrollbar

Toolbar commands

Draft View

Up to now Atlantis always displayed documents in the so called "Print Layout" (or "Page Layout") viewing mode. Under this viewing mode, documents are displayed as a sequence of pages, each page being represented on a separate "paper sheet". Under the smaller zooming factors, several pages are usually displayed together within the same document window:

Under the larger zooming factors, only fragments of whole pages can be seen, along with the page boundaries and interpage margins:

As its name indicates, the "Print Layout" viewing mode shows documents as they will print to paper. This is why such a display is also called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).

The WYSIWYG display is very helpful when you plan to print a document, or save it as PDF. But a lot of people find the display of the page borders and shadows, page breaks and interpage gaps quite distracting, even annoying when they are working on the draft version of a document, or have no intention to print it. This is when the Atlantis new Draft viewing mode will come in handy. Under this new Draft mode, the document contents are displayed as a continuous flow of text without page breaks or page margins. Actually there are no pages at all under the Draft viewing mode of Atlantis:

Accordingly, this new version of Atlantis has two new commands under the View menu:

You will use these commands to switch between the traditional Print Layout view mode, and the new Draft view mode.

Alternatively you can switch between the Draft and Print layout view modes of Atlantis by clicking new buttons above the vertical scroll bar of the document window:

Note that by default the width of the working area in the document window under the Draft view mode is still controlled by the "Page width" and "Right margin" values as defined in the document "Page settings":

As before, you can adjust these values through the "File | Page Settings..." menu command.

But if you enable a new "Draft view: wrap to window" option on the "View" tab of the "Tools | Options..." dialog of Atlantis:

the document text will 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:

The Draft view mode has a few specifics:

• The information shown on the Atlantis status bar is different. Of course, you won't find any mention of the "current page number" since the Draft view mode knows nothing about "pages". In the same way, the caret information does not include any "distance from the page top". The "line number" as displayed on the status bar is the absolute number from the beginning of the document (not from the beginning of the current "page").
   
• Headers and footers are not shown.
   
• The page-related zoom types ("Page width", "Whole pages", and "Two pages") are naturally unavailable.
   
• Multicolumn sections get displayed as if they had only one column.
   
• Footnotes and endnotes (if any), are systematically placed at the end of the document (footnotes first, then endnotes). The notes numeration is continuous from top to bottom.
   
• The "View | Page Margins" command is unavailable, and there is no vertical ruler in the document window.
   

Most "page-related" commands of Atlantis are still available under the Draft view mode. It is the case for instance of the "View | Header & Footer" command. But when you run these "page-related" commands, Atlantis automatically switches to the Print Layout view mode, and displays the document "pages".

Note that the current "viewing mode" of a document is not saved by Atlantis to the document file. But the "viewing mode" used for the last active document is automatically reapplied to any document you create or open in Atlantis.

If you design eBooks in Atlantis, you'll probably use the Draft mode in preference to the Print Layout mode. This is because documents will look much closer to the published eBooks under the Draft view mode than they will under the Print Layout view mode.

Batch conversion

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:

Previews in the Open/Save dialogs

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:

Interpage gaps

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.

Highlighting

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:

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

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

• 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.

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

Horizontal scrollbar

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.

Toolbar commands

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 has been changed in this new version of Atlantis. Here is how the Main set of toolbar commands looks like:

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 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.

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