Thanks, Daly. This surge of attempted and successful censorship in the US is indeed the issue of the day. Appreciate the order, and would love to know what you think. I do give lots of credit to the writing tools I've found here!

MadaboutDana wrote:

I would say the app that still inspires me and finds me new ideas is
FoxTrot Pro, the Mac search app.

You can index anything (or exclude stuff, too), which happens at very
high speed. You can then search by an enormous range of criteria, and
view the results in their own pane, with all hits highlighted (in
different colours, if you've been searching for multiple terms) and a
simple "previous/next hit" arrow system for skipping between them.

The nearest Windows equivalent is dtSearch (very similar, also very
powerful).

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but for PDFs, dtSearch converts it to its own text format losing all the formatting and not rendering paragraphs correctly, and then only shows a dry list of non-clickable paragraphs that contain the search term. It doesn't open the document where the search term is found, the only option you have in the menu is to open the document with your default pdf reader.

I've been using AtlasTi for searching within PDF documents, it has a good inbuilt search, maybe not as powerful as DtSearch's but you can still do a lot. You can choose to display search results at the word, sentence or paragraph level. You can search by group of documents, and the results are displayed in a neat table, which you can jump to in the context with the in-built pdf reader. You can also tag the search results (called "coding" in their lingo) which can be a way to save the search for later use. You can also organize the tags into tag groups and see the results in other contexts, etc.

But even just for ordinary PDF search, I've been using AtlasTI because you can display the results in its paragraph context, so quickly see where the concept I want to find is located.

Well, that's disconcerting – dtSearch used to be the bees' knees for integrated search-plus-preview. But I haven't used it for years (since transitioning to Mac), so maybe it's deteriorated? Or maybe your preview function isn't working properly?

There are other solutions out there, of course, including X1 Search, DocFetcher (especially the Pro version) and the very pleasant Copernic Desktop Search.

But there are lot of new solutions on the market now, too – I was surprised when I did a quick search on alternativeto.net (72 different desktop search apps!): https://alternativeto.net/software/x1-search/?p=2

Lucine wrote:

MadaboutDana wrote:
I would say the app that still inspires me and finds me new ideas is
>FoxTrot Pro, the Mac search app.
>
>You can index anything (or exclude stuff, too), which happens at very
>high speed. You can then search by an enormous range of criteria, and
>view the results in their own pane, with all hits highlighted (in
>different colours, if you've been searching for multiple terms) and a
>simple "previous/next hit" arrow system for skipping between them.
>
>The nearest Windows equivalent is dtSearch (very similar, also very
>powerful).
>

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but for PDFs, dtSearch converts it to its own
text format losing all the formatting and not rendering paragraphs
correctly, and then only shows a dry list of non-clickable paragraphs
that contain the search term. It doesn't open the document where the
search term is found, the only option you have in the menu is to open
the document with your default pdf reader.

I've been using AtlasTi for searching within PDF documents, it has a
good inbuilt search, maybe not as powerful as DtSearch's but you can
still do a lot. You can choose to display search results at the word,
sentence or paragraph level. You can search by group of documents, and
the results are displayed in a neat table, which you can jump to in the
context with the in-built pdf reader. You can also tag the search
results (called "coding" in their lingo) which can be a way to save the
search for later use. You can also organize the tags into tag groups and
see the results in other contexts, etc.

But even just for ordinary PDF search, I've been using AtlasTI because
you can display the results in its paragraph context, so quickly see
where the concept I want to find is located.