Re: Hi... Need your advice

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3700

Posted by graham.smith
2005-08-10 03:38:09

>I have tried Zoot, but it will not handle pdf or big word docs

What exactly do you want here?

I use a combination of Zoot and DTSearch (but there are of course free alternatives to DTSearch). DTsearch opens most files in a viewer, Zoot opens in the native application.

I convert PDFs to text with Omnipage 14 - a bit of pain, but as some PDFs are “image files” rather than “text files” they need converted regardless of the program being used for searching. I batch process these when I am doing something else.

The converted files are left in the same folder as the original PDFs, keep the same name but have a txt extension instead of a PDF extension.

Zoot is then set up to sync with the txt files in Windows folder containing both the PDFs and txt files, and to import the first 32k of text from each text file into Zoot.

This allows searching all the files in the Windows folder and being able to read the first 32kb of text form inside Zoot. Once converetd to text files 32kb is a lot of pages.

When I find a file I am interested in. I change the file extension link in Zoot from txt to PDF and Zoot opens the PDF for viewing. You can set up Zoot to automatically change the extensions as you perform the link operation, but I haven’t bothered.

The same process is used for DOC files except there is no need to convert to txt.

The real advantages of this is that Zoot automatically syncs with the PDF and DOC folders so whenever you add a file to it, you don’t need to do anything in Zoot, the new files just appear when you open the folder. It also keeps the Zoot files relatively small.

The actual content in Zoot is restricted to the first 32K, but it actually searches the whole linked file (or so I am told, I cannot see this in the Help)

DTSearch is a backup for anything I might have missed bringing into Zoot but is still lurking in my hard drive somewhere, but of course even DTSearch won’t search image based PDFs, of which I seem to get rather a lot - hence the need for an OCR program (Omnipage) to convert them to text for searching.

Mind you I wouldn’t really call Zoot an Outliner. Most people here use a combination of programs. My combination is Zoot and DTSearch for general data management and Brainstorm and NoteMap for outlining, plus a mind mapping program(s)

Hope this helps.

Graham

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