Atlantis "Review"

Posted by 22111
Jan 22, 2014 at 08:59 PM

“You can only use it to collect (cut) material from various locations and paste it altogether at one point.”

Well, that’s good enough for many tasks, so this is a good hint! (I once heard of “multiple clipboard in Office”, this must be one of its incarnations.)

Steve, another real goodie (but perhaps you know already): It’s possible to do multiple replace using placeholders. See below.

Steve, on bits there are some (often earlier) posts in the same line, and which go: “I own Word (and others), but most of the time, it’s Atlantis I use.” - I think that’s a good description, and which will certainly now apply to my use of word processors = output for “third parties”, everything - between - letters and longer stuff, but then, for me, that’ll be an “upgrade” since in the past, I used Word 9 for that purpose…

The developer doesn’t seem to realize cross-referencing is important and must survive paper output (be it for Courts or otherwise); judging from the bits posts (first day though, so you’d expect many more than it gets!), there ain’t that many people interested in this program, and people criticise it for not being free (today, and in the past).

All the more so, a developer should target the professional market (“prof” without quotes here), but there, users will NOT “play around” the shortcomings (but use Word instead, for the time being).

I had some playing around with cr (cross-referencing). Since it’s live, I did not expect the following set-up to work in every detail (and it doesn’t in every detail):

- cr hint: £a, £b, etc (for bigger works, that would be £ab, £ac… or some, it’s just important to NOT do 1, 2, 3 and then 10, 11… and then 100, 101… but perhaps start with 100, which gives you 899 possible cr’s, without the risk to do a false 1 instead of 01, or a false 90 instead of 090 (see below) (for most projects, a list of 11…99 will probably do, and if you really need more, you always can replace the existing ££ and $$ by £0 and $0)
- cr target: $a, $b, etc (see above)
or any other special signs that will NOT occur in your text otherwise (e.g. the cent or the Yen sign, or the little 1, 2, 3, or the little a…)

Then have a sheet of paper (or some notepad tool or whatever) where you cross out every such number (you could print out such a list beforehand (Excel should create the list, then print it out as cvr, or is it crv?)))

Now my improbable idea was, what about File Locator Lite (which gives a hit table from which you could write down a concordance list
(4) $c
(9) $a
(27) $p)

for writing it all down from there when you’re ready, and then look all “££” up, one after the other, and replace the number/char there manually (but not the £, see below) - that’s not beautiful, but might be acceptable.

But as said, FLL will NOT show the (4), (9), (27)... (as I had feared).

So you must do it all manually in your word processor:

First, search for all $$, one by one, and write down your concordance table, manually: (4) = c, (9) = a, etc. (A screen print-out of what FLL might have brought should have avoided this step.)

Then, search for all ££, one by one, and do as said above: £c will become “£4)” and so on (see below).

Then, Atlantis additional goodie comes into play:

First (no goodie here):

replace
£
by
(See margin number

Second:

replace
$?
by
(nothing, void, let the field empty I mean)
(here, click the option “use wildcards”)

You will have remarked that this use of wildcards in global replace ONLY affects the search term, not the replace term, unfortunately, i.e. in First above, you cannot

replace
£?
by
(See margin number ?.)

which would be much better of course, but in the replace term, a “?” would simply replace the respective margin number, which is not what you want.

In shorter papers, I have between 3 and 6 such cr’s, and here, such manual fumbling remains acceptable, but you see why elaborate papers are written either in Word or in Latex or markup languages: the above is simply too much fuss.

Btw, it cannot be automated by macroing since the respective margin / paragraph / subtitle number can’t be fetched by the macro. The same applies to several outliners: In UR, e.g., it’s not possible to fetch the cursor position, whilst it’s even clearly indicated in the status line: The status line content in UR cannot be fetched.

Let alone the absence of a (live, or automatically updated) numbering system in ANY outliner I know, and from which you could then try to build a macro for cr.

Whilst all this is available in Word…

Btw, there’s plenty of web findings to spice Word up in this respect, both with macros and with paid add-ins.

And btw, it’s known that Word stability probs with respect to cr occur whenever you import pics, formulas and such too early (i.e. when your cr has not yet been done in full), and when you try to use citation managers together with it.

With macros, it’s possible to enter the respective cr codes (hint and target) into Word, without using the respective Word dialogs. The question remains how a 1,000 page Word doc would react, in its later stages.

I did not yet investigate opening an Atlantis file (again, they are reputed to remain stable even when they grow very big, hence the interest for this) with an external rtf editor, and doing the above-mentioned task there, fully automated. In any case, once you’ll have replaced your cr hints with “live” target indicators, they will become currupt if you then do changes within the same file, e.g. (correction of the above) additions or eliminations before any target in question.