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Rediscovering FoxTrot Pro
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Posted by Simon
Apr 29, 2019 at 08:15 PM
Dellu wrote:
>The ios app of FT displays only the plain text format of the pdf files.
>That is just useless to me because I need to see the whole thing: many
>of my documents contain graphs, and syntax trees. Searching and
>displaying just plain text is just useless to me.
>
>But, FT doesn’t affect your original files. You can use it with
>Devonthink or Bookends because these two apps have better ios
>companions.
Many thanks. I tend to only need text information generally.
Posted by Dellu
Apr 29, 2019 at 08:28 PM
satis wrote:
>> “PDF search” (http://www.pdfsearchapp.com/) is much more functional
>>than FoxTrot personal.
>
>I wonder what it offers over the less expensive DEVONsphere Express
>and/or HoudahSpot.
PDF search is better than the rest of the search software because it makes a page-by-page comparison. Others including Foxtrot, Devonsphere and Devonthink ranks files by simply counting the number of words occurring across the whole document (file).
I used to complement this weakness by exploding (splitting) large pdf files into smaller chunks. You can look at: https://wordpress.com/post/dellu.wordpress.com/558
As the comments in the linked page suggest, there are indeed some drawbacks to compare smaller chunks (pages). But, my experience has been, breaking large documents is very useful to spot the right section/document/page.
With PDF search, there is no need to split large files because it indexes each page individually.
Posted by Dellu
Apr 29, 2019 at 08:30 PM
Sorry, the link is this one: https://dellu.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/why-you-need-to-burst-your-books
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 30, 2019 at 10:02 AM
Hm, that is a really interesting feature in PDF Search. I’m going to have to look at it more closely…
Re: FoxTrot
FT attaché does allow you to save copies of docs for transfer to iOS, but I confess I’ve never done it. You’ll find the option in the “Configuration” section of the “Manage Indices” dialog box. You can apply it on an index-by-index basis.
FoxTrot has another very useful feature that people may not be aware of. If you want to take a detailed look at a document in your search results, you can do so by double-clicking it (default setting) or opening it using the context menu’s “View in FoxTrot Pro” option. This opens a new view of the document with its own search field. If you type text into this search field, you get an “instant search” functionality (i.e. the system starts to produce results immediately, as you’re typing). For really zooming in to detail, this is an invaluable feature. By default, FoxTrot opens documents into a tabbed secondary viewer, so if you’re researching annual reports (as I am at the moment), you can open several documents of particular interest in separate tabs in a separate window (from the main FoxTrot Pro search window; which also supports multiple tabbed searches, incidentally).
Re: HoudahSpot
I really want to like HoudahSpot, but I’ve found that it’s so much slower than FoxTrot Pro (or indeed, DEVONthink), that it’s simply not worth using as a proper research tool. No idea why this is the case, but slow-slow-slow (even after optimising indexes etc.). This even applies to the latest version, alas, which I tested over the weekend.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 30, 2019 at 10:10 AM
I like your thoughtful post on relative importance criteria in search results, Dellu. Interesting point.
Oh dear, PDF Search looks very interesting, too. Love the “save search results as a second PDF” feature…