[awp]

Originally Posted by nohuhu

From your blog, I got an impression that most of the new features and improvements are related to epub and that could mean that the editor is groomed as primary tool for the ebook preparing...

Actually it is just a coincidence that many posts in the Atlantis Word Processor Blog are about its "Save as eBook" feature. It is a relatively new feature which was introduced 6 months ago. We also made many improvements to this feature following positive response from our end-users. The Atlantis blog itself is also a relatively new thing – it is only 3 months old. So it is quite natural that there should be many eBook-related posts in the blog. But of course there will be posts on other issues and features of Atlantis.

We understand that most members of the mobileread.com forum might be interested mainly in the EPUB creation feature of Atlantis. But the "Save as eBook" feature is just one of the many features Atlantis has to offer. First and foremost Atlantis aims at being a fully-fledged word processor. It won't ever be a simple conversion tool, not even to the EPUB format. Atlantis is not built around its eBook-related capabilities like other eBook software discussed in this forum. The Atlantis eBook feature is rather an add-on to the main capabilities of Atlantis. One of the mottos of Atlantis is "the creative writer's best friend". Atlantis is designed mainly so that writers can compose and format text as easily and conveniently as possible. This is the most important and daunting task facing a writer, the e-publishing phase itself being only rather like the final icing on the cake.

Quite understandably, many writers are totally unfamiliar with such things as scripting, XHTML, CSS, OCF, OPF, OPS, conversion to the EPUB format, etc. Their job is to write text, not to become experts in the EPUB or XHTML arcane specifications. As a matter of fact, the conversion to the EPUB format often proves a real stumbling block to a lot of writers, as is obvious from this teleread article. This is why we have added the "Save as eBook" feature to Atlantis, so that people do not spend so much time on various EPUB stuff meant for programmers or tech geeks but not for writers. The idea behind the "Save as eBook" feature of Atlantis was to make EPUB file creation as simple as possible. This is why Atlantis does the conversion to the EPUB format fully automatically: only a few mouse clicks are needed to convert any document to an EPUB file. Atlantis users can write their own documents from scratch or import existing documents in any of the supported formats (DOC, DOCX, RTF, ODT, TXT). Converting them to a publishable EPUB file is then as easy as ABC.

Originally Posted by nohuhu

Are there any plans for including regular expressions Search & Replace as standard feature?

"Regular expressions" are on the wish list. But I cannot say when they will be implemented in Atlantis. Honestly, they are not on the "most urgent" list.

Originally Posted by nohuhu

Scripting/macros? If you could embed Perl in there...

Sorry, but it is unlikely that Atlantis will ever support Perl scripting.

Originally Posted by nohuhu

I think it couldn't hurt to add importers for "competing" ebook formats.

If other major eBook formats were "open", we would consider adding support for them.

Originally Posted by nohuhu

When it will be possible to open epub document for editing?

Any document opened in Atlantis is first converted to the internal format of Atlantis. A book content in this internal format can be then converted to the EPUB format. From a purely technical point of view, an EPUB document could be converted to the internal format of Atlantis. But even if Atlantis was capable of importing existing EPUB files, re-saving them in Atlantis would produce a rather different EPUB content. Atlantis could not automatically perform the "delicate" EPUB tweaking that is necessary in such cases. You can however perform advanced tweaking of any EPUB file yourself manually if you use our free tweak_epub utility.

But if you want to edit EPUB files generated by Atlantis, it is much preferable to open the corresponding source documents in Atlantis, whether they have been created in the RTF, DOC, or DOCX format, edit them as desired, then re-save them in Atlantis as eBook (File | Save Special > Save As eBook...). The conversion to the EPUB format will then be as lossless as possible.

Originally Posted by nohuhu

Is it possible to import html documents?

Atlantis currently cannot import HTML documents. But it is fairly easy to convert HTML text to the RTF, DOC or DOCX format. Internet Explorer has a command to "Copy selection to the clipboard". It places data onto the clipboard in RTF format. So you can open any HTML document in IE, "select all" text with Ctrl+A, "copy" the selection with Ctrl+C, then paste the clipboard contents into Atlantis with Ctrl+V. You'll get a reasonably faithful copy of the original HTML text.

Originally Posted by nohuhu

Finally, any thoughts on ditching that outdated and inconvenient MDI approach?

What's wrong with the "Multi Document Interface"? Would you rather have multiple document tabs on the Windows Taskbar? Actually, many seasoned MS Word users look back nostalgically to the good old days when MS Word had a MDI interface… I am not even mentioning the new ribbon GUI of MS Word 2007+.