myBase Desktop 6.x + Addons Packfor PC on Bits Du Jour today

Posted by 22111
Oct 18, 2013 at 12:50 PM

This is both perfect and real-world, meaning I do such things on paper, and later on, I often don’t have the slightest idea what my - too short, obviously - note was meant to trigger from me; I lately put lines on my papers when I begin something “new” there, since without, I too often have asked myself what my note was meant to mean in the previous context, when in fact I had just tried to make economies of paper, and it was a new one…

But you point out to a necessary distinction:

- “Context”: what I meant / am hoping for, is xxxxxxxxx YourSearchTerm yyyyyyyyyyy: even that is scarcely available

- Then, there would be previous line // context line (see above) // next line (and then a line to distinguish this find from the next one, or differently colored background, white/chamois/white/chomois and so on). This would be much better but is not available anywhere in our context, but I have seen such “find tables” in dedicated programs, perhaps in the web only, can’t say where… perhaps in the results for finds in some forum (perhaps it was even finds for the TheBrain forum, but then, it could be wishful thinking on my part).

On the other hand, here and there you can get such “several lines in context” in rare cases, not as context for your search, but as I have said already elsewhere here, MyInfo’s version 5 had an option where for every find the very first 3 lines of content were displayed; this was no help for real context, but if you “organized” your very first lines of your items in a smart way, that function could have been really useful in other “context”. They withdrew it for version 6, promised to reintroduce it later on, but that was about 2 years ago… or is it 3 years now?

- Back to our problem: For one-line entries in your content, probably with a blank line before and after, or in any case where the previous and/or next line is a blank one, the previous thing is not useful, so here “context” (that would not be blank) would mean, “if line before is blank, show the last (???) line of the previous paragraph instead”, and my ??? insinuates that in such cases, the very FIRST line of the previous paragraph would perhaps the better alternative to display instead; for “next line”, similarly, “if next line is blank, display the first non-blank line as third line within the find table”.

Permit me to say that many developers do not want to delve into such “line break problems” even if it’s really useful. As an example, most (or many) file comparers are not even able to consider the following lines as “equal”, by option, and e.g. the developers of (otherwise not bad at all, but then, “moved block” ain’t processed either here, so in the end it’s not that good) “Beyond Compare” acknowledge the problem, but don’t see this as a reason to resolve it:

File 1:

Rather short title of paragraph, for example “Paragraph 1” and then begin of paragph, after just (another) space : Several text lines
of this paragraph
blah blah

File 2 (which for example you want to save in your outliner, in a more neat form):

Rather short title of paragph, for example “Paragraph 1” (but then, you’ll have introduced a line break!:)
Several text lines
of this paragraph
blah blah

Now if you want to compare a new version of this text from the web, for example a law in its latest version, from some legal authority, BC is NOT able to consider your saved version

Title
Then paragraph content

from the new version you’ve downloaded

Title Then paragraph content

And this means that with BC, you simply cannot “edit” your downloads to bring them in this more neat form, since then BC will give you hundreds of false alarms fo co-called “changes”, for a law containing several hundreds of paragraphs: no chance here.

Now compare with what outliners and their search functions can do: No chance…

- But you mentioned another level of “context”: item title of previous item, and item title of next item! As before, for previous/next line, this should indeed be available by option (and technically, it’s not really difficult, neither is the 3-line display described above), so you would have finds table options:
—display line (with context before/afterwards)
—display line with previous and next line (the disadvantage here is you need 3 times as many lines within your finds table, so I wouldn’t like to have this mandatorily, but by option: when really you need it, but only then), and finally
- display line with together in this form (that would be FOUR lines, though!:)

title of previous item
title of item in question (bolded)
line of found term (found term bolded, context regular font)
title of next item

And above, for 3-line display:

previous line (if blank, first line of previous paragraph if there is any)
line of found term (found term only: bolded)
next line (if blank, first line of next paragraph if there is any)

So much for things we will probably never see in our life.