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Advice on research software
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 17, 2013 at 05:27 PM
Splendid. Thanks for the contribution, ML - interesting. I’ve not used graphics in FM Pro, but I know it has copious support for them (I was recently reading an interesting article about how one of the major studios uses FM Pro to manage the foreign-language versions of their films - most unexpected!).
FM Pro is an interesting application, with a vast range of potential uses. If you get the Advanced version, you can create your own apps - including apps for iOS which don’t need to be approved by Apple (all users need is the - free - FM Pro 12 app from the App Store).
You can even create outliners with FM Pro (I know, sad geek that I am, I’ve actually sat down and done so, in a much earlier version - 7.5 from memory).
Posted by 22111
Aug 17, 2013 at 05:40 PM
I don’t see how such a task could be done with the Adobe product. I also jumped 30 cm up when reading “Access, a free-form database”. Dr Andus could easily give you 2, 3 or 4 names of dedicated software (CT not being one of them as far as I know, but might “do” it, Dr Andus knows it thoroughly, so he only could tell), but those are in the range of 1,000 to 3,000 dollars / euro, except for students (which have the problem that in most cases, their cheap versions do expire rather soon, it’s not as with MS and such).
Technically, a relational database can do it, but it was on purpose I put those examples here: The problem with relational databases is that with such a task, they don’t work well but when you atomize your texts into paragraphs, which means you will lose the context: With “1 paragraph = 1 record”, it’s quite another thing than what most people really need there, and which is “1 paper = 1 record, but then, be able to freely gather paragraphs from everywhere, not losing their respective source references”.
I don’t know the defunct free-form database mentioned above, but I know askSam, and I’m 100 % POSITIVE that it can do it, per so-called “reports”, but only if you invest some time into the re-arrangement of your coding (not: coded) data, but with the “global replace” function, before entering the data into AS, or even within AS, this should be possible.
Since I pretend it’s possible, I also need to say that yes, you would have to “code” every paragraph as a (multiply-occuring) “field”, and then, the “header info” as another (unique) field, and then, with proper coding, gathering all relevant paragraphs from anywhere, together with their respective “headers”, is possible.
Records would look like this:
#HeaderFieldIdentifier[respective data of the header; could be divided up into several fields, e.g. all in one line, or in several of them
Attention: In order to be able to change / add fields in AS afterwards, have (even empty dummy) fields in such lines; it’s (except for external scripting) the only way to add fields between other fields, example: field1[askjfsdfas] dummyfield2[(left empty)] field3[asdfklhaskflhsafkhsd]
Now you can insert a field “2a” by replacing
] field3[
by
] newfield2a[] field3[
This is extremely primitive, but at least it works, and whenever AS is the only program that’s able to execute your task, such headaches suddenly become acceptable.
Further down, the “real content” of each record:
t[text text text, even for several lines
]
t[again text, text]
t[again text, text…
text…]
This is ugly, but it is the only way of doing it as far as I know, and this way, AS is able to do it, by your taking advantage of AS’ ability to process identically-named “fields”, in its searches, and in its “reports”.
AS has been moribund for years, but is in current development, and, depending on the size of your material, you would need the “prof.” version, e.g. for 5,000 records with something between 3 and 100 paragraphs, but perhaps you will just have 500 such records, and even for 1,000 records, the “standard” version will amply suffice (the only difference being the lacking search index here, but any results are identical, just take a little more time then); also, AS is regularly on bitsdujour, so buying the “standard” version full price, then buying the “prof.” version on bits some other day should be a viable policy.
This is a cumbersome but working solution for this task.
The only alternative I know of is scripting, meaning you put your data into separate files, or all your data in one text file, and then you put together macros that work on this stuff.
Of course, this requires some scripting ability, and worse, you will have very long lines, not paragraphs, and no way to have formatting like bolding and such.
That’s why you should spend some hours with trialling AS, with your imported data.
As for coding the data there, for each paragraph = “t[” “field”, this could be done in the form “#28”, “#ac”, etc, as part of the first line of these paragraphs / multi-line “fields” and then searching for those “near” each other whenever you need them in combination.
Many people continue to work with AS each day, in spite of numerous problems with that software (do lots of backups; don’t search for a forum anymore; perfect search is by command line only, but the respective commands can always be found in the web) - the above use is one of those where AS excels or even is unique.
Posted by 22111
Aug 17, 2013 at 05:54 PM
I forgot, in order to prepare your data for import into AS, you would need an editor or a text processor or something in which you would be able to replace
blankline
by
] return then the blankline and another return and then t[
which is not possible within AS. In short, you need MS Word or another of those innumerable text processors that allow for command characters within the replace function.
Posted by 22111
Aug 17, 2013 at 06:08 PM
Also, in the above example, the empty dummy field “2” is not necessary, since you could do the replace with the end-”]” of field “1” instead, but keep an eye on having such dummy fields as first, and as last field within a line, whenever it might be necessary to add another field there later on.
It goes without saying that the inflexibility with fields is one of AS’ biggest shortcomings, let alone any “re-arranging” of fields, being strictly impossible, but as said, it preserves your paragraphs’ context, which relational databases do not, so all this is annoying but becaomes “acceptable” in the end.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 17, 2013 at 06:12 PM
On the contrary, it’s perfectly possible to assign contexts to individual paragraphs in a modern relational database. That’s because it’s perfectly possible to auto-assign tags, sequential numbers, codes extracted/summed from multiple fields etc. There’s quite a lot of work involved, as there is in any kind of structural definition (your askSam example makes the same point, as it happens; I’ve worked with askSam, which is not dissimilar to Idealist, but without the clever scripting language Idealist used to have
). Once you’ve set up your structures, you can be sure of systematically and consistently obtaining the same kind of output repeatedly, which is where relational databases excel. Again, I emphasize that obtaining best results from an RDBMS is all about knowing what you’re trying to achieve.