Hello Atticus authors, and hopefully maybe
a few future Atticus authors. Welcome back to the Atticus Training Zone. My name is Monique Danielle. If we have not met before, I'm
the educational curator here over at Atticus. So we did a update to the user interface,
which is basically just how things look. This was mainly
so that we can prepare for future updates. these live streams are really here to help you get comfortable and familiar
and find where everything is. And then in the future there will be now
lots of space and a really strong foundation for all of the plans
that are yet to come with Atticus. our goal overall with the program
is to become a one stop shop for authors. We want you to be able
to jump into Atticus and do everything that you need to do,
from writing to publishing your book, or at least getting published ready files
to send off to a publisher. currently you can do all of your writing
and your formatting in Atticus, but we do have a lot of exciting features
yet to come in terms of plotting and outlining and the big one,
which is collaboration. So this new user interface
has set the stage to allow us to start
rolling out some of those updates. So that's the why behind this update. But to get started,
I'm just going to jump in and I'm going to share
my Atticus account with you. So you should be seeing that
on the screen now. And this is the new look of the dashboard. If you are not seeing this
or if at any point in the future you ever kind of see a white screen when you try to log in, sometimes Atticus
does need to be refreshed. This is sometimes because of the program
itself or because your browser has updated and that has created a need
for just a refresh of everything. So if ever your you sign into Atticus
and it does not look like this, what you'll want to do
is just come over to the profile icon in the top right here
and just click the logout button. If you don't see it,
then you can just skip to the next step. But once you're logged out,
you can just sign right back in and then you're going to want to do
what we call a hard refresh. So on a Windows computer,
you're going to press control shift R on a mac computer,
you will press command shift R that covers most devices
and it just gets everything refreshed. It's kind of like turning your computer
off and on again, You may have noticed that it also exported a file
when you whenever you log out of Atticus or if you click the save button up here,
which says content backup, it will export what is called a JSON file. This is a snapshot of your entire account
on Atticus, which can be used to restore everything
to that exact point in time. And one of the beautiful things
about Atticus is that it does automatically save everything
that you're writing as you're writing it. So if you go write a chapter today
and then go to bed, come back on tomorrow,
all your content will be there. It does back up into the cloud. Whenever you press that backup button
or when you log out, though, it creates like a timestamp. So our programmers,
if anything were to happen, if you accidentally deleted book
or you wanted to go back to a previous version
or anything like that, having that point in time,
timestamp really makes a difference when our our programmers have to go
and check the archive for something. I'm getting ahead of myself though. Let's look at the new dashboard. So all of the features are
the same as what you had before. It just looks a little different. So now up at the top
you have your upload a book, start a new book,
or create a new boxset features. Really easy to use as always. To the top right -
this is a new section here. It will link you straight through
to our tutorials page on our website. That is where we keep
written copies of any of our tutorials. So we walk you through
pretty much every single feature that's available on Atticus
and how to use it. And these include screenshots as well,
so you can learn at your own pace. If there's something you want to explore, you're not quite sure how to do something. You can click through to our tutorials
and you will likely find some information there to help you
through the process at any point. If our YouTube videos or our tutorials
or the chat bot on our website is just not giving you
the information you need, you can absolutely always write
into our support email. We will take very good care of you. We have an amazing support team
that continues to grow because we find it so valuable to have support
ready for you at all times. So there are books in your account, yours may be more full
or less full than mine, but all your most recent works
will show front and center. And then if you scroll down,
you will now see your master pages. So this used to be tucked away
in a little gallery on its own, and you could either click
through to the gallery or you could access your pages, your master pages in a book. You can now access it right from your home
dashboard. You can open up a page,
you can make a change, and you can apply it
right from your dashboard here, or you can still do it from within
in a book as well. That is still an option. Now if you click See All either
by the master pages beside your recent works here, or if you come up
to the top center and click My Books, you get a more full view of everything
that is included in your account currently, all of the works
that you have been working on in Atticus. This includes all of your books,
all of your boxsets, all of your master pages. You can sort them by all by books
or simply by your master pages. You can search by the title of your book,
The Author. If you're using various pen names
or if you have at any point set up a version or a project,
you can sort and filter by those here. So I know
I have set up a whole set of workbooks so I can type that in here
and only the workbooks will show. You can also sort by this way, currently your options are recently added date
modified or alphabetic by project or version
will be added to this list very soon. We just have to make a few small tweaks
and they will be back. You can sort your dashboard here either
by the standard grid view or in list view
if you are more comfortable this way. Whichever you prefer. editor. A few things have changed here, so I'll go
through all of the different features. This isn't a tutorial
on how the features work. It is just kind of a lay of the land
where to find what. So the left navigation panel,
you have all of your chapters in the body section, you have your front matter here,
you have still the add a chapter button and you've got your extra pages where
if you want to add some of the templates, the preset layouts,
if you need to replace a title page or if you want to add a full page image,
this is also where you can insert
any of your pre created master pages. And if you need to import another docx file into the book you've already started
working on, you can do that here. Some of the differences is
you used to have your book title up at the top here
and you would click on that to open your book Details page. Now it is a really easy to access button, so you can click the button
to edit your book details. This is a really good example of how
we've tried to streamline everything. So instead of having to scroll down
a long page full of details, it's a little bit
more well-organized, easy to find everything more whitespace, more
just easier to see. But all of the content is still there. So you can have your book details here,
you have your publisher details. If you want to add those,
you can still upload, your e-book cover. So also in the book detail section,
you can do your exports here. You can export to epub, PDF,
or docx Files, and this download snapshot button here is a backup of
just the book that you're working on. So we already talked about the backup
content here which exports a json file and backs up
your entire account on Atticus. This one here will export JSON files
that is just the individual book you're working on
and it creates a snapshot or a timestamp of this book in your cloud
archive. Going back into the writing
editor up here at the top, you have your standard toolbar,
which hasn't changed very much. You still have all of your settings here. The big difference is at the end
you used to have the sprint timer and the apply smart quotes. Those have been relocated,
so I will show you where those are in just a moment
when we kind of get to that section. But otherwise the main writing
toolbar is fairly pretty much the same. The chapter heading the chapter
menu options used to have a little gear icon
right beside the title. It has now just moved to the right. This is just adding
a little bit more consistency because these icons are always to
the right of whatever you're working on. So your chapter menu
options are just over here. These will override any settings that you have set
for your theme overall for the book. So if in just one chapter
you don't want to have the heading, you can select that here. Or if you want to hide it
in the table of contents, that sort of stuff, it's in the icon here. We used to have the
the saving saving saved notification up here in the top, right, for consistency
with other programs. We've just moved it down here, which is where you will often
see it in most programs. So this will tell you
that your work is saving also due to popular demand, we've made it a little bit easier
for you to export your content to Doc X so you can find that button in the writing
panel right down at the bottom here. This is the new home for your sprint
timer, so you can select that here and this is where you can see
your word count. So you can set it to the book as a whole. The chapter you're working on,
or if you have a selection highlighted, this used to be a menu that you could
click on and get your word count. We found that a lot of authors
want to know their word count at a glance. They want to know how far they've
got to go to get to their daily counter or where they are in their books. So having this set so that it is always
there was a popular request and makes it a little bit easier
for you to see at all times now. the right panel used to be able to pull out a separate
menu called the more Tools Menu. It's just a little bit more streamlined
here, but all the features are the same. So you have your writing
editor preferences here. This is just for your comfort as a writer. It affects the writing section only. It does not export. Anything that you want to export
you will set up in the formatting portion. So if you're writing an Atticus,
this is just how it makes it more comfortable for you
as a writer. You can also do your find
and replace for chapter book level. This is pretty much the same
as it always was. Your goals are more or less
the same as they always were. The goal and the writing habit. And this is where the smart quotes
applicator has moved. So you used to see the little icon up here
letting you know if there were any inconsistencies in your quotes,
and that is now in the sidebar and you can still apply as always,
it works the exact same way. It's just a slightly new location. The other one major change is you can now open the previewer
right from the writing panel. You don't have to be in formatting
mode to open this. You can come down to the very bottom right
and open the previewer here. You can still change to print mode
or any other device settings that you would like
and you can close that out if you want to have a more distraction
free writing experience. So that that's
just a slightly new location. So you can add that down here. That's the writing editor. Now I'm going to jump into formatting,
so once your book is all written and you want to create your custom theme, this is almost the same as it was before. You don't have your left navigation
panel here instead, you have a lot more space
to see everything you can go through. The Atticus Pre created themes or you can work on one
that you've customized yourself. You can click the three dots
beside any theme that you want to work on
and you can edit it to make it your own. This is where things
start to look a little bit different. But again, our goal here was make it a little bit sleeker, a little bit easier
to find everything quicker to navigate through instead
of having to scroll down a huge long page, you can now access a menu and jump right
to the portion that you want to deal with. Everything other than that works the same
so you can turn on or off certain elements
if you do not want to have them in your book,
you can add your chapter image here. You can still move it around. You can use your background image
if you choose. All of these are pretty much the same
as they were, just slightly different Layout paragraph settings,
Subheading settings, scene break and notes are all more
or less exactly the same. Just easier to jump
to using the side panel here where it did
change a little bit is the print settings. So for your print book
you do have some extra options that are not set in the e-book version. So your e-book version,
a lot of features are set by the individual user device,
including like the font choices. And you don't have to choose the page size
because it just depends on the device, that sort of thing. But you do need to have these settings
really nailed down for the print version of your book. So in the print layout here you have your margins
and you can size your indents here. If you're using indents in your book,
you can choose your alignment to be either
justified or hyphenated or both. Keep options refers to
if you have either an ornamental break or a subheading that ends
as the last line on one page, and then the following paragraph
gets bumped to the next page. Keep options will keep
that ornamental image or subheading with the next paragraph
so they get bumped together. Layout priority down here
you can choose this. I always emphasize the fact
that this is one of the biggest areas that book formatters
really earn their high priced keep. the best of both is the Atticus algorithm,
which first prioritizes for widows and orphans, and then it goes
through and balances the pages. This will never be 100% perfect. Absolutely all of the time. But it does the best job at mitigating both of those features
with literally the click of a button. So it can save absolutely hours off
of the formatting process. So that's the print options,
the typography refers to the font in your print book, so you can choose your
your body, font and size and line spacing. Here the header and footer
is the running text along the very top and bottom of the page. Usually where your page number is, you can
choose your layout from the options. Here there's quite a few
and you can choose those. You can set the font
and size here as well. And then finally
you do have the trim sizes so you can set the size of your book
that will be print to that. And then you have your preview
where you can see how everything looks. Again, you can, of course, switch it over
to print and see how it looks in print. You can flip through your pages. You can even jump
through different chapters. And then when you're fully confident
that everything is how you want it to be, you can export to PDF
or epub using these buttons down here. Or again,
as you saw before in the book details, So that is a quick overview of where everything is located
now, since the update has occurred.
