Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.1.8 is a minor release with new features. Please read on for details.

Document projects

More customizability

Document projects

At times, you will be working on documents that are linked to one another in some way. For example, you might be working on several documents concurrently, each representing individual chapters of a book. You will often want to open all these related documents together. This is done by including them in an "Atlantis Document Project".

When documents are saved as an Atlantis Document Project, the whole set can be loaded at one go, as a single object.

The Atlantis document projects are plain text files with the .adpr file extension (ADPR stands for "Atlantis Document PRoject). They only include the full path names of the related documents. For example, an Atlantis ".adpr" file might look like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\John\My Documents\Chapter 1.rtf
C:\Documents and Settings\John\My Documents\Chapter 2.rtf
*C:\Documents and Settings\John\My Documents\Chapter 3.rtf
D:\Archive\Draft text.rtf

In this example, the document project includes 4 RTF documents. The asterisk placed in front of the third filename indicates that it will automatically be the active document when you open the project in Atlantis.

When you create or open a document project, Atlantis automatically switches into the "project mode", and the name of the project is displayed in the title bar:

When Atlantis is in the project mode,

• all open documents are automatically included in the current document project,
   
• all the documents that you close are automatically excluded from the current project.

Atlantis has a dedicated File | Document Project menu:

• Click New to create a brand new project. Atlantis will ask you to provide a name for the project before creating it. All open documents will automatically be included in the project. Note that creating a new project automatically closes any previously open document project.
  
  To add documents to an open project, simply open more documents in Atlantis, or create new documents.
  
  To remove documents from an open project, simply close them. They will no longer be considered as belonging to the project.
   
• Click Open... to load all the documents belonging to a given document project. Note that opening a project automatically closes all previously open documents.
   
• Click Save to save all the currently open documents and the current project file (the .adpr file) to disk. Note that you will rarely need to use this command because projects are automatically saved when they are closed, or when you close Atlantis under the project mode.
   
• Click Save As... to save all the currently open documents and the current project file (the .adpr file) under a different name.
   
• Click Close to save the current project with all the open files, then close them. Atlantis will automatically switch into its standard non-project mode.

More customizability

Using the Favorite Fonts feature, you can specify which font faces you want displayed in the various font lists of Atlantis. In this new version, you can also edit the list of predefined font sizes offered on the Atlantis toolbars:

To specify the favorite font sizes that you want Atlantis to use, you can now click a new Font Sizes... button in the Tools | Options... dialog of Atlantis:

Clicking this button displays the Font Sizes dialog:

To add a new size to the list of font sizes, type the desired font size in the edit box, and click the Add button:

To remove a font size from the list, click in the list to highlight the relevant font size, then press the Remove button:

Press the Restore Default button to revert to the original list of font sizes:

Also new in this version of Atlantis, you can now assign hot keys to individual font faces, font sizes, font colors, and highlight colors. Accordingly, the Tools | Hot Keys... dialog now includes these new categories of commands:

Let's take an example. Let's suppose that you want a hot key to apply the "Verdana" font face directly from the keyboard. Here is how to create the hot key:

1. Select the "Fonts" category in the Tools | Hot Keys... dialog, then highlight (click) the desired font face (in our example, "Verdana"):

   
   
    

2. Click in the New hot key box, and either press the desired key combination on the keyboard, or click the "..." (three dots) button to choose a hot key from the list of unused hot keys:

   
   
    

3. Press the Assign button:

   
   
    

   The newly assigned hot key will be shown in the Assigned hot keys box:

   
   
    

4. OK out of the dialog to register your changes.

The newly assigned hot key can now be used to apply the "Verdana" font to any selection of text in the document window.

Note that the hot keys assigned to font faces are included in the screen tips displaying when you scroll down the font list with the mouse pointer. Here is the screen tip showing the hot key assigned to the "Verdana" font in our example:

Of course, you can assign a hot key to any other font face available on your system.

The Tools | Hot Keys... dialog can be used in the same way to assign hot keys to font sizes, font colors, and highlight colors.

But note that hot keys can only be assigned to the font sizes listed in the Tools | Options... > General > Font Sizes... dialog. So if you want to assign a hot key to a font size not yet included in the Font Sizes dialog, you must add that font size to the Font Sizes dialog first.

A similar note holds regarding assigning hot keys to font colors and highlight colors. Hot keys can only be assigned to the colors offered on the Atlantis color palettes:

So if you want to assign a hot key to a color not yet present on the Atlantis color palette, you must add that color to the color palette first. For this, use the Customize... button of the color palette:

In Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.1.8, hot keys can also be assigned to individual items of the Format Palette. The menu displaying when you click the Edit properties of the highlighted format button of the Format Palette now includes a new Hot Key... item:

Clicking this Hot Key... command brings up a dialog where you can specify a hot key for the item currently highlighted on the Format Palette:

When a hot key is assigned to an item of the Format Palette, the corresponding formatting characteristics can be applied at one go to any selection in the document window, simply by pressing the assigned hot key. No need to open the font, then the paragraph dialog, you can apply complex font plus paragraph formats instantly with a single hot key.

In the Tools | Hot Keys... dialog of this version of Atlantis, you will also find a new button:

Press this button to display all the hot keys currently assigned in Atlantis, including the hot keys assigned to Format Palette items and to symbols in the Insert | Symbol... dialog:

Note that some of these items will be displaying in bold lettering. These are your custom hot keys:

This dialog also includes a Copy To Clipboard button. Press it to place the entire list of assigned hot keys onto the Windows clipboard. The list can then be pasted into a new Atlantis document and printed for easy reference.

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