Atlantis "Review"

Posted by 22111
Jan 21, 2014 at 01:05 AM

To my first post there, the author responded (if I interpreted him correctly) that he wasn’t sure he could do it. I very much hope he’ll see that all that is between (him and Atlantis) and (his first dollar million) is very precisely that very last mile he will have to go, too - except for this feature, Atlantis is very powerful, much better than I had imagined, from its price and from its market “relevance” which both don’t reflect the importance of that fine program.

http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/atlantis-word-processor#comments76674

I’ve done real-life trial with Atlantis in the meanwhile.

- Of course, shortkeys can be assigned to styles, it’s done in “Format-Styles” - then select the style - then “Modify” - then “Hotkey”. Sorry, my fault.

- Another potentially very helpful feature is “Multiple Selection” (Help file: “Editing Documents - Multiple Selection”); years ago, I encountered a Mac text processor which did that, but since I don’t own a Mac, I had thought I had to live without that feature forever, and here it is: Splendid!

- Not only there is the above-mentioned outlining function, but also there is an INCREDIBLE POWERFUL paragraph NUMBERING function. It’s rather complicated since it offers almost everything you never even thought of, and it’s a little bit hidden; help file: “Formatting Documents - Bulleted & Numbered Lists” (! Here, you could assume it’s the usual little lists functionality, oh no!) - then “Fundamentals”, etc., and especially, “Style-Controlled Lists” - as said, it’s incredible powerful, and it’s worthwile to extensively play around some 2 hours with it.

And there is a “trick” to it which is not obvious but something worthwile mentioning. As above, “Format - Style” - choose the style and “Modify”. Then, go to the “List” button of the “Edit Style” dialog which will appear, and there, default is “Level 1” - so you don’t see this splendid feature. But change the selection to “Level 2” or below, and then an additional checkbox is displayed: “Restart after higher level”.

Now this is set “on” by default, but the trick is to define another not-headings paragraph style as numbered here, let’s say in the way (1), (2), etc., let’s say on “level 6” or so, as “special numbered”, or the other round, if you do legal papers, “format” your “Normal” = regular paragraph style this way, and have another one, “NN” for “not numbered”, for regular text which is NOT to be numbered by paragraphs (add additional blocks of text to existing paragraphs (and which should not be numbered on their own, by separating them by shift-enter instead of enter) - again, the “Restart after higher level”, here, exceptionally (this will be your only style where you do this), must be UN-checked.

The result, if you also “format” 3 or 4 levels of headings correctly (and every which way you choose), will be texts that go as follows (and you can indent, etc. as you like):

I - Header 1
A - Header level 2
1 - Another one, level 3
(1) a text paragraph
(a) Header level 4
(...)
(24) text paragraph (and choose “level 5 (or further down for them! because this way, their text begin will appear within the outline!!!)
(25) another text paragraph
II - Another header level 1
A - Level 2, again
1 - And level 3 again
(26) another text paragraph

and so on

University students are not allowed to do this, they must cite “(as seen in I - A - (1) - (a) (3))”, but everybody else will simply refer as “(see (24))”, and I don’t have to tell (European) people in the legal professions (in the U.S., very strict other rules apply) how useful this “flow numbering” is - in Germany, they do whole books this style, with 1,600 such paragraphs, and then, even, an index referring to these, notwithstanding the proper “outline” of headers overlayed to this paragraph-instead-of-pages setup.

- So you see here that the foundations are very well there, this program has tremendous potential. And now for cross-referencing. I’ve found both the “Viewing Documents - Bookmark” and “Editing Documents - Hyperlinks” help file entries, but I don’t see how we could do a live cross-reference with them, either in the style of “(See I - A - (1) - (a) (3))” or in the style of “(see (24))”, let alone these references being then updated when we move paragraphs or whole sections, and updating is even necessary whenever we then add a new paragraph between the link target and the link pointer.

As I see it, Atlantis has everything that’s needed for legal documents, in a much smoother application than that monstruous MS Word, but almost any lawyer today uses MS Word, since there (s)he gets the necessary cross-referencing. I personally think Atlantis, spiced-up with that function, would make an entry in law offices (and many, many offices in large corporations) like thunder.

It’s the core functionality that will make explode Atlantis’ sales.

(I know that live tables (You can always insert tables as images, and yes, I’m very aware that’s not the same thing.) are quite important, but from a marketing pov, an application should build up on its real strengths, especially when such additional work there will open up a tremendously big market.)