• TOM’S INTRODUCTION: Over the past week, I have been engaged in an informative discussion of word processors with blog reader JR, who seems as obsessed with exploring all of them as I am. Because he is especially familiar with ATLANTIS, which has never been covered here, I asked if he’d be willing to share his review. Here’s his insightful contribution. THANKS, JR! [NOTE: our discussion was conducted via "Comments" about one of my own software reviews. I would deeply appreciate it if more blog readers would engage in this kind of dialogue -- for the benefit of all of us.]

Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.1.9
www.atlantiswordprocessor.com
$35 as of 11 September 2008

By JR, Guest Columnist: Always on the lookout for my ideal word processor for Microsoft Windows, I investigate any promising word processors that I read or hear about. My ideal word processor would resemble an updated and slightly enhanced Windows-compatible descendant of the ancient (early 1990s) Mac application WriteNow (by T/Maker) — a model of convenience and user friendliness, and, I dare say, the only computer application that I’ve ever loved. WriteNow was lightning quick and efficient and had all the features I needed back in the day — and those features were incredibly easy and convenient to access and employ, including the most intuitive and powerful implementation of stylesheets the word-processing world has ever known. WriteNow was as organic and elegant and intuitive as Microsoft Word is not. WriteNow was purely a word processor, however, with no graphics capabilities aside from being able to insert graphics as in-line text. Atlantis Word Processor is something of a modern-day WriteNow in terms of features, but it’s saddled with a more familiar and conventional (Word-like) but less elegant and efficient user interface.

Atlantis is based on the Rich Text Format (RTF) format. While that inherently restricts Atlantis’s capabilities in many ways, it does make Atlantis somewhat universal: most word processors are RTF-compatible to at least some degree and can handle most things that Atlantis spits out. Paragraph and character formatting are almost always maintained, but advanced formatting (footnotes, columns, page numbering, stylesheets, etc.) may or may not be maintained depending on just how RTF-compatible the other word processor happens to be. It’s been my experience that Microsoft Word and Lotus Word Pro have few if any problems with heavily formatted Atlantis RTF documents; WordPerfect, on the other hand, has trouble with even the simplest RTF documents, even those generated by WordPad. Atlantis can also save documents in Word’s DOC format, so that might be the way to go in cases when you want to make sure that fancy formatting is kept intact — though, of course, the target word processor must have good Word compatibility in those cases. Most word processors can create and save documents in the RTF format, but Atlantis seems to do a particularly good job of it. (Word and Word Pro do a good job as well, but WordPerfect sucks at RTF.)

Atlantis has a clean, straightforward user interface, and its toolbars, menus, and hot keys are very customizable. Most of the button icons are intuitive and easy to figure out, but the ones associated styles and stylesheets never fail to confuse me — I have to keep the balloon help on to help me identify them. Organizational features such as bookmarks, sections, stylesheets, list, etc., can also be accessed via a Control Board panel to the left of the main widow. I wish the Control Board included a mini file manager for convenient access to documents, but it doesn’t.

Advanced formatting/properties are changed via the usual dialog boxes that will be familiar to users of Word and Works and most other modern word processors. (Here I would have much preferred something along the lines of Word Pro’s uniquely efficient InfoBox, an all-in-one dialog box that allows you to change the formatting/properties of pretty much anything in the document without having to open and close a series of separate dialog boxes; the InfoBox can be left open while you select text or paragraphs at your convenience.) Paragraph stylesheets operate in the usual way, similar to Word’s, but they are nowhere near as intuitive and powerful as WriteNow’s — why all word processors haven’t adopted/stolen WriteNow’s great implementation of stylesheets is beyond me. Disappointingly, Atlantis has no character stylesheets. (I use paragraph stylesheets routinely, so they’re very important to me. I use character stylesheets only occasionally, so their absence here isn’t a deal-breaker, but it does make me sigh.)

Atlantis has all the features of a good mid-level word processor and some of the features of an advanced word processor: table of contents, header/footers, footnotes/endnotes, variable columns, sections, paragraph stylesheets (but no character stylesheets), etc. It does not, however, offer index creation, a glossary, mathematical formulas, true outlining (it has outlining via paragraph stylesheets), tables, text boxes, drawing/painting, or graphics (except for the insertion of graphics in-line).

The Spellchecker and AutoCorrect are very good and very customizable, though Spellcheck As-You-Type does slow the program slightly. There’s no built-in thesaurus, but WordWeb (a popular freeware dictionary/thesaurus) can be integrated into the menu system. There’s no grammar-correction feature, but AutoCorrect can check for many common types of typos. Atlantis has too many little conveniences and odd little features to mention here, but many of them are quite useful. Atlantis has proven to be stable with fairly complex documents up to 75 pages in length, the longest I’ve written with it. Weighing in at less than 4MB, Atlantis is a quick download and is easy to install and test. It’s also portable and can be installed directly to or transferred to a memory flash drive. There’s a U3-smart version, but I have no experience with that.

Despite its shortcomings, Atlantis is probably the most convenient and least troublesome of current mid-range word processors that I’ve used, and it’s the best RTF word processor that I’ve come across. Its lack of fancy graphics capabilities and advanced scientific/technical writing tools will immediately eliminate it from consideration for many writers, as will its $35 price tag, but old-school wordsmiths looking for a pure, unadulterated word processor that’s light on its feet and easy to use might want to give it a try. I’m still waiting for the Second Coming of WriteNow, but Atlantis is a good stopgap. By JR, Guest Columnist

• TOM’S COMMENT: My dream for this blog-website is to gather in one place original reviews and links to external reviews of every conceivable writing tool available today — an online reference, if you will, to assist the inquiring writer find tools that will increase one’s productivity. If anyone else has personal experience with a tool that they would be willing to review, indicate your interest in the comments section of this post.

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