Thesaurus

[Derek Benner]

Yep. I'm using Atlantis to do my entry into this year's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) contest. And I gotta say I love it.

However, when you're busting your ass to write an entire 50,000 word novel in just 30 days, it helps to have an integrated thesaurus. Any chance? Or maybe there's an external one which works well with Atlantis?

Derek

[admin]

Try WordWeb:
http://wordweb.info/free/
It is free, and can be used to look up words from within most programs.

[Robert]

Greetings--
There is a "WordWeb Hot Key..." option on the WordWeb Options menu.
When the WordWeb Hot Key is set, all you have to do is run both WordWeb and Atlantis, select (highlight) any word of interest in the Atlantis document window, and press the WordWeb Hot Key. WordWeb will automatically pop up with the corresponding definition and related words.
Cheers
Robert

[Jimmy]

You're absolutely correct, WordWeb is a terrific program. I use it everyday.
One reason I still put up with the quirks of Word 2002 (some of which are truly awful) is its ease of use with WordWeb. For example, I don't have to grab the mouse to highlight the word I want to look up in WordWeb. If the cursor is immediately before, inside, or immediately after the word I'm interested in, Word automatically highlights it and then WordWeb is launched with the word of interest in the "Lookup" window. Is this possible to do with Atlantis? If you say it's not, I'll have no choice but to believe you. I read the discussion with Mintcheff and it made my eyes cross and my ears bleed.

[Robert]

You're absolutely correct, WordWeb is a terrific program. I use it everyday.
One reason I still put up with the quirks of Word 2002 (some of which are truly awful) is its ease of use with WordWeb. For example, I don't have to grab the mouse to highlight the word I want to look up in WordWeb. If the cursor is immediately before, inside, or immediately after the word I'm interested in, Word automatically highlights it and then WordWeb is launched with the word of interest in the "Lookup" window. Is this possible to do with Atlantis? If you say it's not, I'll have no choice but to believe you. I read the discussion with Mintcheff and it made my eyes cross and my ears bleed.

Greetings--
Atlantis will never highlight words automatically. You have to highlight the word of interest yourself. But selecting a word in Atlantis can be done without the mouse. It can be done from the keyboard, using the cursor keys. When the word is selected, you can press the WordWeb Hot Key.
Cheers
Robert

[keyosuke]

I've been using wordweb for a long time and it integrates nicely with Atlantis and windows in general, but it's a standard to have a thesaurus feature in a word processor today, as observed by most other word processors. Wordweb gets the job done right now, but I think it would be good if the people I gave Atlantis do didn't complain to me that they don't have an integated thesaurus. It would easy their conversion to not have to use an unintegrated program. It's similar to how amatuer computer users seem to like using AOL for the integration of its various internet applications. Advanced users, like most of us probably are, typically prefer to choose their own addon programs, so i'm not advocating including everything on earth in a word processor, but people are familiar with having at least a menu command that launches thesaurus functions in their word processor, so I think Atlantis should have an addon called "Wordweb Integration" that merely adds a shortcut to wordweb to the Atlantis tools menu, with the menu text "Thesaurus..." and the installer for this addon would prompt the user to download the free version of wordweb. That seems like a happy compromise that would prevent people from complaining that the are missing something they had before.

I recognize that the developers are probably continually working hard on table support and the like, but please consider something of this nature for later. Since it could be implimented as an addon, it might require Atlantis to have an addons/plugins interface. If there was or is such an interface, future features could be added without the need of a new version, and people could have their unbloated word processor while other choose to manually add the bloat with a downloadable plugin that adds third party functionality. Control over Atlantis could still be maintained by having an official plugins download page that shows only what plugins are acceptable to be added to Atlantis, if that is a concern. Just some ideas for the future, after tables and the like are done.

Thanks
Joe