This release of Atlantis Word Processor includes new and improved features, plus a number of bug fixes.
Please read on for details.

Overused Words

Repetitions

Frequencies

Writing Time & Speed

Endnote Suppression

Miscellaneous Features and Fixes

Overused Words

All creative writers know that they should avoid repetitions and clichés if they want their texts to be read with any interest or pleasure. Overused words are simply boring and will invariably put readers off, whether these "tired" words belong to the common stock of catch phrases used by most people, or to the writer’s own idiosyncratic style. Obviously, overuse of any kind will be more noticeable if it occurs within short portions of text.

This is when the Atlantis "Overused words" feature comes in handy. It will show detailed statistics about repetitions and word frequency. This will tell you where words need to be replaced with synonyms, or whole paragraphs reworked.

The Atlantis "Overused words" feature is accessed through a new command in the "Tools" menu:

As an option, you can assign a hot key to this command (please use the "Tools | Hot Keys..." dialog).

The "Overused Words" new dialog has two tabs – "Repetitions" and "Frequencies":

Repetitions

You will use this tab to scan your document for repetitions of words or phrases.

Atlantis will consider that two words or phrases make a repetition when they are identical and are separated by less words than the amount specified as the minimal distance allowed between repeats. In other words, Atlantis will ignore repetitions if the two instances are separated by at least the specified number of words:

Let's take the previous screen capture as an example. Atlantis was instructed to ignore repetitions if they are separated by at least 15 words. But this also means that any two identical words or phrases separated by less than 15 words will be reported by Atlantis as a repetition. In the following text, Atlantis would report the two occurrences of "banks" as a repetition:

This is because these repeats are separated by only 6 words. They do not respect the specified "safe" distance of 15 words. They are considered to be "too close" to each other:

If there had been 15 or more words between these two instances of the word "banks", Atlantis would have assumed that they were not a repetition.

The "Ignore repetitions separated by at least NN words" setting allows you to control how close two identical words or phrases have to be to each other to be treated as a repetition. If you choose a smaller separating number, fewer pairs will be reported as a repetition (the two words will have to be very close to each other to be reported as repeats). On the other hand, a larger number will cause more words to be reported as a repetition (the two words could be located at some distance from each other).

Repetitions of completely identical words obviously create redundancy. But so will repeats of words whose spelling is different but are pronounced in the same way (homophones). The same can be said of prefixed or suffixed variants of related words (inflected or derivative forms). All such repeats can be detected by Atlantis. Appropriate options are available on the same tab:

When "Report inflected forms" is checked, Atlantis will report repetitions of the same words, but also repetitions of inflected forms (or derivatives) of these same words. For example, occurrences of "designer" and "redesigned", "spelling" and "misspelt", "begun" and "beginner", etc will be reported as repetitions if they are found "too close" to each other.

When "Report homophones" is checked, Atlantis will report repetitions of words that are pronounced in the same way but differ in meaning and are spelt slightly differently. For example, Atlantis will report instances of "be" and "bee", "fisher" and "fissure", "I" and "eye", etc if they occur too close to each other.

The "Custom..." buttons next to these two options allow you to specify custom groups of inflected forms or homophones.

Note that the present version of Atlantis has built-in support only for inflected forms & homophones of the English language. You’ll have to add custom inflected forms and homophones yourself manually for other languages than English.

Scanning a document for repetitions is done by clicking the "Next" (or "Previous") button:

The "Next" button searches the document text for repetitions in the forward direction starting at the current caret position. The "Previous" button searches in the backward direction. When found, pairs of repeated words or phrases get highlighted in the document window:

You can do three things with a reported repetition:

1. You can eliminate the repetition by reworking the corresponding sentences. This can be done by rephrasing them, or by adding more text between the repeated words, or by replacing one of the repeated words with a synonym. You can look up and replace words with synonyms by right-clicking the words in the document window and launching the Thesaurus command from the Atlantis context menu.
    
2. You can ignore the repetition if you believe that it is not a problem. Simply click the "Next" or "Previous" button in the dialog.
    
3. Finally, you can instruct Atlantis to never report a particular pair of words. For this click the "Always Ignore" button and Atlantis will add the currently highlighted pair of repeated words to its exclusion list:
    
   
    
   This exclusion list can be edited. Click the "Words to Ignore..." button to open the dedicated dialog:
    
   

When your search for word repetitions is finished, use the "Close" button to dismiss the "Overused Words" dialog:

Frequencies

The second tab of the "Overused Words" dialog provides writers with general information about word usage in a document. It lists all the words used in a document along with their frequencies (how many times these words are encountered in the document). It also can list phrases used in a document twice or more:

If you select an item in the list of reported words and phrases, you will be able to navigate among the occurrences of the corresponding words in the document window. Simply click the "Next Occurrence" (or "Previous Occurrence") button:

If you want Atlantis to select all document occurrences of the items currently highlighted in the report list, click the button with such a provision:

Atlantis will highlight all the related occurrences as a multiple selection in the document window.

When all occurrences are selected, you can close the "Overused Words" dialog, and navigate among the various occurrences using the "Show more selections" button on the Atlantis toolbars.

You can also format all the selected words in any suitable way (underline, font color, special style, etc) so that you can deal with them at a later time.

You might want to entirely exclude some words or phrases from the texts that you write. For example, you might have your own "idiosyncratic" set of "tired" words or phrases. If you believe that these "tired" words reduce the quality of your texts, you could add them to the list of unwanted words & phrases so that Atlantis can warn you about their use. There are two ways to do this.

First, you can click the dedicated "Unwanted Words & Phrases..." button:

A dialog will pop up, allowing you to add any unwanted words manually:

Simply type the words in the "Unwanted Words & Phrases" box, and press the "Add" button.

However there is a simpler way to deal with unwanted words and phrases. When you encounter an unwanted word or phrase within the list reported by Atlantis, you can click that unwanted item, then the "+" button next to the "Unwanted Words & Phrases..." button:

This will automatically add the currently highlighted item to your custom list of unwanted words & phrases.

Any such unwanted word or phrase is displayed by Atlantis in red so that unwanted items are easy to spot within the complete list of reported words:

Noticing unwanted items is even easier when the "Bring unwanted words to top" option is checked at the top of the "Frequencies" tab. When this option is checked, all the retrieved unwanted items always appear at the top of the wordlist:

Removing items from the unwanted list is also easy. You can do so by clicking the "Unwanted Words & Phrases..." button and using the "Delete" button in the pop-up dialog. But you can also simply select a reported unwanted word or phrase directly in the "Overused Words" dialog, then click the "–" (minus) button to the right of the "Unwanted Words & Phrases..." button:

At the top of the "Frequencies" tab, more options allow you to control how words and phrases are displayed:

• You can choose how words get sorted with the "Sort in alphabetical order" and "Sort by frequency" buttons:
   
  
   
• You can ask Atlantis to report all inflected forms (derivatives) of the same word as one list item, i.e. regroup them on the same line. For this check the dedicated option:
   
  
   
  On the other hand, inflected forms of the same word are reported separately if you uncheck this same option:
   
  
   
• You can ask Atlantis to report numerals by checking the corresponding option:
   
  
   
• The "Frequencies" tab picks up all single words. But when the "Report phrases" option is checked at the top of the "Frequencies" tab, phrases are also reported:
   
  
  
  An important note. Phrases are reported only if they occur at least twice in the document. But phrases included in the unwanted list are always reported, even when they occur only once.
   

Now you might want to export the entire list of retrieved words & phrases (including their frequencies) in a plain text format. This is easily done. Simply right-click the reported wordlist, and use the "Send to Clipboard" command that is displayed:

The entire wordlist will be sent to the Windows clipboard. You can then paste it into any document in Atlantis, including the Clippy Bank, to examine it at a later time.

Writing Time & Speed

When you have to work on a document under time constraints, you might want to know how long you spend writing it, and how long it would take to complete this document. This version of Atlantis gives you such information.

The "Tools | Status Bar..." dialog has two new options to display related information on the Atlantis status bar:

To enable these new panels, check the corresponding boxes in the above dialog, then click OK. The "Writing time" and "Writing speed" panels will be displayed on the status bar:

As you already know, Atlantis offers status bar panels reporting character count. These panels are also enabled through the "Tools | Status Bar..." dialog. They allow you to determine how much text should still be added to your document if you know how many characters have to be included in the whole document.

The new "Writing time" panel displays how much time you spent writing the active document. This is not the time between when the document was created and now, or the total time the document was open. It is the time you actually spent typing text in the active document or formatting it.

The "Writing speed" panel says how quickly you add text to your document. When you know your "writing speed" and how many characters still need to be added to your document, it is fairly easy to find out how much time it will take to complete the document. For example, if your writing speed is 200 chars/min, and you still have to add 2,000 characters to your document, completing the document should take about 10 minutes.

All information about writing time & speed is stored by Atlantis in the Windows Registry (or in an INI file if you have chosen that global option). At times, you might need to reset that information to 0. To reset the collected information about writing time & speed for the active document or for all documents that you previously edited in Atlantis, right-click the "Writing time" or "Writing speed" status bar panels, and choose the dedicated command from the popup menu:

Endnote Suppression

As you might remember, endnotes of a document section can appear either at the end of that section, or at the end of the document itself. The location of endnotes for all sections of a document is controlled through the corresponding option in the "Insert | Footnote..." dialog:

When you choose "End of document" as the location for endnotes, these will naturally appear after the last section in the document. However, at times and in documents with complex structures, you might still want to keep all the endnotes at the end of a specific section, and not at the end of the document as originally set. For example, the last section of a document could include an index or a set of appendixes. Accordingly, you will need to have all the endnotes before that last special section, not after it.

To allow such a document structure, this version of Atlantis introduces a new option in the properties of a document section. There is a new check box in the "File | Page Settings..." dialog:

This option is applicable to documents where endnotes are supposed to be displayed at the end of document section:

When you enable this "Suppress endnotes" option for a particular document section, all its endnotes will appear at the end of the next section. Let's take an example.

Let's suppose that you have five sections in your document. The first four are "chapters," and the last one is an index. To have all the endnotes of sections 1 through 4 to appear at the end of the fourth section, just before the index section, simply take the following steps:

1. Choose the "Insert | Footnote..." menu command, select "End of section" as the location for endnotes in the document and click the "Apply" button:
    
   
    
2. Select sections 1 through 3 in the document with the mouse or keyboard.
    
3. Open the "File | Page Settings..." dialog.
    
4. Check the "Suppress endnotes" box on the "Layout" tab, and make sure that the "Apply to" box says "Selected sections":
    
   
    
   Then OK out of the dialog. As a result, all the endnotes of sections 1 through 3 will automatically be moved to the end of section 4, right before the endnotes of section 4 (if any).

The "Sections" panel of the Atlantis Control Board offers an alternative way to toggle the "Suppress endnotes" option for individual sections in a document:

Miscellaneous Features and Fixes

• In this version of Atlantis you can transfer page settings between documents with a few mouse clicks. Let's suppose that you want to use the page settings of Document 1 in Document 2. Here is how this is done most easily:
   
  1. Switch to Document 1, and open the "File | Page Settings..." dialog.
      
  2. Press the "Copy" button, then use the "Cancel" button to close the dialog:
      
     
      
  3. Switch to Document 2, and open the "File | Page Settings..." dialog.
      
  4. Press the new "Paste" button, then the "OK" button:
      
     
      
  The page settings of Document 1 will automatically be applied to the active document (Document 2).
   
• This version of Atlantis has improved "Full screen" and "View side by side" modes. These two modes can now work concurrently so that you can view two documents side by side under the Full Screen mode.
   
• Atlantis now remembers the view mode that you choose in its various Open/Save dialogs, and will use the same mode whenever you reopen these dialogs:
   
  
   
• The Power Type suggestions are now regrouped following inflected forms:
   
  
   
  This makes it easier to choose a proper suggestion from a long list of suggestions.
   
  Note that the built-in support for inflected forms is offered only for English documents in this version of Atlantis.
   
• The "File | Save Special" menu has a new "Save Copy As..." command:
   
  
   
  This command can be used to create a cloned copy of the active document without affecting the display of the original file. For example, at some stage you might want to place a copy of the active document on your memory flash drive. For this, simply choose the "Save Copy As..." command, and specify your memory flash drive as the target drive.
   
  This new command can be placed onto the Atlantis toolbars ("Tools | Toolbars..."). It can also be assigned a hot key ("Tools | Hot Keys...").
   
• In this version of Atlantis you can exclude words from the spellchecker lexicons of Atlantis. Please click here for details.
   
• Under some Windows themes and on some systems, the drop-down color panel of the "Highlight" toolbar button appeared blank, or the "Special symbol" buttons in the "Find / Replace" dialog were missing or had no graphic image. This version of Atlantis includes a fix for these problems.