Hi, I am a translator and have for some time been looking for a handy tool for registering collocations, expressions and idioms, as well as synonyms and other snippets for my work. I am pretty happy with ResophNotes in some respects. It syncs flawlessly with Simplenote online and consists of two panes and a search window. The first pane is used for entering categories, like "synonyms" or "collocations". The main entry window takes the notes, like "stand, to attention" with examples or translations. So far, so good.

Now I just type the word "stand" in the search window, and all the categories where that word occurs, are listed in the left pane. I can see that there is an entry under "collocations," If the number of collocations entered is low, that is no problem as it will show up in the window on the right. Trouble is, if you have hundreds of collocations, you have to wade through screenfuls to find the relevant one(s), because the window shows all collocations, it does not filter out the ones that don't have "stand" in them.

I would be very grateful if someone could suggest a SIMPLE tool that has a good search facility and might work like Resophnotes, but filter out lines that are not hits? Very nice if would have a google-like search facility so I could just type in the words "stand" and "attention" to get "stand to attention" hit(s) highlighted.

Hi guys 'n' gals! Sorry, been very, very busy (but not complaining!), so haven't posted here for a while. Just thought I'd respond to Egil's interesting query, however. I've just been corresponding with Sam, creator of the wonderful Noteliner, having discovered that it's pretty much perfect for translators. Why? Well, because Noteliner's find function is filter-based, so "zooms in" on specific terms in specific "records" (i.e. entries) just like a database management system. This means isolating specific instances of a specific term is really, really easy. What's even more impressive is that when you've got a filter running, the little arrows next to each entry in the list of filtered search results change colour. If you click an arrow, the whole entry appears, so you can see the filtered term in context (a bit like the Concordance function CAT - e.g. Trados - users will be familiar with). But you can click the arrow again to return to the filtered list! Brilliant!

But it gets better.

If you use tables, you can also create bitexts (tables of aligned dual-language entries) really easily - and guess what? Noteliner treats those like database records, too. So if you apply a search filter, you only see the table rows containing the search terms you're looking for! And yet the same arrow technique can be used to "zoom out" to see the whole table, effectively giving you another Concordance view. Magic!

The only downside at the moment is that you can't easily import files. It's possible to open CSV files in Noteliner, and they can be edited to create tables, but it's a distinctly laborious process. The good news is, when I wrote to Sam asking whether he was considering adding an import function (for tab-delimited text files, for example), he said he was, and that this functionality will be the focus of the next version, 3.4. What a Magic Bunny, eh?!

Which could mean that Noteliner emerges as an unlikely but thoroughly deserving solution optimised for us translators!

Cheers,
Bill

Thanks, Bill, Noteliner does look promising!

Only trouble so far is I don't quite get it as far as the various search possibilities are concerned. If I want to find a note containing "searched him out", writing in the words search and out in the search window gives nothing, but this is what I would like to do to see all the instances of phrase, like "searched her out" and "searching them out". Any clues?

Egil

Hi Egil,

Right now the search is pretty simple. It looks for a perfect (ignoring case) match. But making the find a little bit smarter by allowing it to recognize 'and' or 'not' should be pretty simple. I'll put it down for 3.4.

Sam

Hi Sam,

That is great news! Ignoring case is fine, but getting AND and NOT would be excellent.

Egil

Sam Hawksworth wrote:

Hi Egil,

Right now the search is pretty simple. It looks for a perfect (ignoring
case) match. But making the find a little bit smarter by allowing it to recognize 'and'
or 'not' should be pretty simple. I'll put it down for 3.4.

Sam

Splendid fellow, Sam! I agree with Egil - case is not important (in fact, non-discrimination is preferable!), but basic Boolean search support would be brilliant.

That really would turn Noteliner into something closely resembling the mutt's dangly bits...

Cheers,
Bill

Now that we are jumping with joy, I have yet another wish:

Shift+F3 to change case, like in Word, clicking through "dog" to "DOG" to "Dog" to change a highlighted term. Any chance of getting that In 3.5, Sam? :-)

I am getting carried way away here, but I can think of yet another way of improving the Search function:

If we could sometime in the distant future have a NEAR function like in dtSearch where you can specify that words will be within a certain number of words of each other, like "dog w/5 cat" to say that the word dog would occur within 5 words (or whatever number) of cat, THAT would be sensational. Very useful or searching long documents.

Egil

The one missing feature of Noteliner that drives me absolutely nuts is not being able to CTRL+SHIFT+left or right arrow to select a word or group of words. Arrrggghhh!

Ah, yes, have to agree with that one, Sam! It is remarkably, unexpectedly disconcerting!

Cheers,
Bill

The new version (out on the 24th) seems to have added this ability.

Glen Coulthard wrote:

The one missing feature of Noteliner that drives me absolutely nuts is not being able
to CTRL+SHIFT+left or right arrow to select a word or group of words. Arrrggghhh!