Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.5.1 is available for betatesting.

This version of Atlantis is a minor release with a new Draft viewing mode. Please read on for details.

Up to now Atlantis always displayed documents in the so called "Print Layout" (or "Page Layout") viewing mode. Under this viewing mode, documents are displayed as a sequence of pages, each page being represented on a separate "paper sheet". Under the smaller zooming factors, several pages are usually displayed together within the same document window:

Under the larger zooming factors, only fragments of whole pages can be seen, along with the page boundaries and interpage margins:

As its name indicates, the "Print Layout" viewing mode shows documents as they will print to paper. This is why such a display is also called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).

The WYSIWYG display is very helpful when you plan to print a document, or save it as PDF. But a lot of people find the display of the page borders and shadows, page breaks and interpage gaps quite distracting, even annoying when they are working on the draft version of a document, or have no intention to print it. This is when the Atlantis new Draft viewing mode will come in handy. Under this new Draft mode, the document contents are displayed as a continuous flow of text without page breaks or page margins. Actually there are no pages at all under the Draft viewing mode of Atlantis:

Accordingly, this new version of Atlantis has two new commands under the View menu:

You will use these commands to switch between the traditional Print Layout view mode, and the new Draft view mode.

Note that the width of the working area in the document window under the Draft view mode is still controlled by the "Page width" and "Right margin" values as defined in the document "Page settings":

As before, you can adjust these values through the "File | Page Settings..." menu command.

The Draft view mode has a few specifics:

• The information shown on the Atlantis status bar is different. Of course, you won't find any mention of the "current page number" since the Draft view mode knows nothing about "pages". In the same way, the caret information does not include any "distance from the page top". The "line number" as displayed on the status bar is the absolute number from the beginning of the document (not from the beginning of the current "page").
   
• Headers and footers are not shown.
   
• The page-related zoom types ("Page width", "Whole pages", and "Two pages") are naturally unavailable.
   
• Multicolumn sections get displayed as if they had only one column.
   
• Footnotes and endnotes (if any), are systematically placed at the end of the document (footnotes first, then endnotes). The notes numeration is continuous from top to bottom.
   
• The "View | Page Margins" command is unavailable, and there is no vertical ruler in the document window.
   

Most "page-related" commands of Atlantis are still available under the Draft view mode. It is the case for instance of the "View | Header & Footer" command. But when you run these "page-related" commands, Atlantis automatically switches to the Print Layout view mode, and displays the document "pages".

Note that the current "viewing mode" of a document is not saved by Atlantis to the document file. But the "viewing mode" used for the last active document is automatically reapplied to any document you create or open in Atlantis.

If you design eBooks in Atlantis, you'll probably use the Draft mode in preference to the Print Layout mode. This is because documents will look much closer to the published eBooks under the Draft view mode than they will under the Print Layout view mode.

Feb 6, 2009. A new "Draft view: wrap to window" option has been added. Plus there are two new buttons located above the vertical scroll to switch between the Draft and Print layout view modes of Atlantis. Click here for details.

Feb 8, 2009. Miscellaneous improvements. Click here for details.

Feb 26, 2009. "Highlight color" has become a fully-fledged font formatting attribute. Click here for details.

Mar 5, 2009. The new "Batch conversion" feature. Click here for details.

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