Forum Posts Feed
Rediscovering FoxTrot Pro
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Dellu
Apr 30, 2019 at 10:37 AM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>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.
I totally agree with your point on HoundahSpot. It is nowhere close to the fine details of Foxtrot. For searching tools that use the Spotlights database, I find Spotfiles (https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/51082/spotfiles) much more faster.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 30, 2019 at 10:44 AM
Although, alas, the SpotFiles developer appears to have given up (according to the posts on MacUpdate).
Posted by Dellu
Apr 30, 2019 at 10:56 AM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>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).
>
Absolutely:
These fine details is what made Foxtrot incredibly powerful.
These feature made Foxtrot an amazing companion to researchers (knowledge workers).
- The separate window is incredibly useful. The absence of the separate window was the reason I find the Personal version of Foxtrot useless.
- the Excerpts in the main window
- the proximity search
- the metadata searches such as the Title, Authors etc of pdf files
- separate search line for Spotlight comments and tags
- the tabbed search
- saving search history (bookmarking)
Indeed, I spend most of my day reading and searching inside Foxtrot. I open the original files in PDFexpert (when I need to carefully read and annotate it) only occasionally.
If I have to use just one application for my research, Foxtrot is indeed going to my choice.
PDF_search is good; but not as powerful as Foxtrot. Comparison of each page is nice feature (as it avoids the need to split the big documents), but, other options such as the proximity search, metadata search etc don’t exist in PDF_search. The database that PDF_search creates is also very huge, in comparison to that of Foxtrot & Devonthink.
My database of about 12,000 research articles is:
- 11.44GB in the Finder folder
- 4.49GB in Devonthink (indexed)
- 769mb in Foxtrot
- 9.88GB in PDF_search.
As you can see, the Foxtrot database is very disks-pace friendly as well (i don’t know how they did this).
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 30, 2019 at 01:28 PM
Wow, that really is disk-space-friendly! I’ve been vaguely aware that FoxTrot’s indices are very efficient, but having it spelled out like that is an eye-opener!
And yes, I’ve just invested in PDF Search (that per-page trick alone is useful, but so is the saving results out as a separate PDF thing).
Don’t forget that FoxTrot (Pro, at least) does allow you to save documents out to iOS, as well. You just have to check the right box!
Posted by Dellu
Apr 30, 2019 at 01:43 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>Don’t forget that FoxTrot (Pro, at least) does allow you to save
>documents out to iOS, as well. You just have to check the right box!
wow, you are right. I never noticed that option before.