Well, it's improved, but I honestly think it's not a good product. Maybe I'm too perfectionist.
The main problems in my opinion are for print:
- You cannot use your own licensed fonts, because the PDF generation is done on their servers (and there's no way to upload a custom font).
- The word spacing is bad.
However most of the other things lacking in that old thread are still lacking. No support for tables, no support for half point fonts, etc.
I think the widow/orphan control has improved (with respect to paragraph lines split across pages), but there's still plenty of words alone on a line. Maybe I'm more cognizant of it, but I'll have to go through some trad pub books and compare more in this area...
For ebooks, I think it's fine. It's not impressive, but it's good enough for me. I've been using it while working on my own ebook creation software.
For writing books, it's just plain awful.
- Still no dark mode
- Support for scenes is lacking. At least now chapters in the binder can be expanded to reveal scenes, and you can click scenes and edit only one scene at a time. Except, you cannot manually add a scene. You have to add new scenes by creating new scene breaks within the chapter view. Which means if you want to insert a scene between scenes 3 and 4, you have to do it from the chapter view. Despite the fact that you can name scenes, scene names do not show in the chapter view! When you rearrange scenes, your selection / editing view of scenes is reset. So e.g. you're editing scene 3, move it to before scene 2, and it switches the editor view to the chapter view.
- Even more limited choice of fonts for the editor
- Cannot resize the editor unless you resize the entire window
- Can't hide the notebook/binder
- No distraction-free / fullscreen writing mode
- There's no automatic smart quotes. This is seriously baffling. The solution they offer is a button that converts all quotes in a book to smart or straight quotes, but it still does not do real-time smart quotes as you type.
- There's still a bug where if you stay logged in too long your login session expires, and the entire Atticus window is blank. AND IT STILL DOESN'T SHOW AN ERROR MESSAGE OR LOGIN FORM. I'm so mad you guys. I reported this bug more than two years ago. I think this is a very user unfriendly bug that non-technical people will be confused by and the only solution is a "magic hotkey" to force reload the app.
At first I thought the product was just rushed to market, but it's been years now and I'm still not happy with it.
If you want professional results, a pro formatter is probably worth the money. You can always do it yourself using tools like InDesign or Affinity Publisher for limitless design freedom, but that comes at the cost of learning how to format yourself and it can be quite time consuming to learn.
If your books are relatively simple novels and you're not too picky, Atticus might be fine. I think the lack of control is generally considered a "feature" to make the software easier to use. But I have standards, god damn it. (this was mostly meant as a joke but it rings true)
In general I would agree with alhawke in that working with a person can be a time-consuming pain. Plus it can be expensive, revisions may not be free, etc. I still have not personally used Vellum, but if you're looking to changing backmatter for every book you have published, reformatting everything using Vellum is probably the best solution. My personal opinion is that I still do not consider Atticus good enough to use for print. So since you want to update both ebook and print, I would recommend you try out Vellum and see if you like the results.
Keep in mind, if you do want to use Vellum (or Atticus, although please don't) for print, you should be sure to order new proof copies. So here's the problem with your plan: using completely different software to reformat the book for what is essentially maybe a one line change or something is taking a sledgehammer to the walls. It might be good for your future and the best choice for more control over your work and ease of updating in the future, but a change in the formatting may cause significant changes to the page count, especially if you don't know all of the details of the margins, spacings, font sizes etc. that your formatter used. A change in page count may result in a change in the spine width, so you may have to update your cover images for print to the correct size.
