Concordance Software for Mac?

On Feb 19, 2008, at 6:04 AM, David Clark wrote:

> I'm looking for decent and cheap Concordance software for Mac that
> will create a full concordance of a large PDF. I have numerous
> documents created in a word processing program (probably Word for
> Windoze) and then converted to PDF that are quite large -- 30 or so
> pages -- and I'd like to create a full word list.

Sounds like a job for, Perl! But first, you need the text as text.
One thing Adobe Reader has over Preview.app (at least as of 10.4) is
Adobe Reader has a Save As Text option. Sure, in Preview you can
Select All, Copy, then Paste into a text document but Save As Text
seems easier and I think the output might be cleaner. If you want a
concordance created from multiple PDFs, you could probably merge them
together using a program like Combine PDFs then use Save As Text.

http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml

Now for the Perl. Since text manipulation is its forte, I figured
this was a problem someone already solved. I searched for
"concordance" on perlmonks.org and got many hits. This post at the
end of a thread from 2001 seems to work nicely.

http://perlmonks.com/?node_id=104687

I literally selected and copied it from the web page, pasted it into
a text editor, saved it (by convention perl scripts end in .pl),
typed 'perl ' in Terminal, dragged the Perl script to the window then
dragged a PDF's saved text to the window after it and hit Return. Out
came an alphabetically sorted list of words, each followed by a
number indicating the line number on which the word appears.
Actually, at first the line numbers didn't work correctly because
Adobe saves the file with a Mac line ending (CR) and the script only
recognizes Unix line endings(LF). There are many options but I opened
the text file in Text Wrangler, changed the line endings from Mac
(CR) to Unix (LF) and saved (Windows CRLF) would also work).

If you didn't want the line numbers, you could change this line:
     print ("$key ", join (', ', {$concord{$key}}), "\n");
to this:
     print ("$key\n");


When I wanted the concordance saved to a different file, I did the
same typing and dragging then added " > output.txt" which redirects
the script's output from standard output (the Terminal window) to a
file. Unless you changed directories in the Terminal window,
"output.txt" will be in your OS X account Home directory.

On Feb 19, 2008, at 3:04 AM, David Clark wrote:

> I'm looking for decent and cheap Concordance software for Mac that
> will create a full concordance of a large PDF.

Concorder (free)
http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/concorder/concorder.html

Concorder Pro (free)
http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/concorderPro/concorderPro.html

AnalyzeText ($49)
http://www.wuffwuffware.com/products/AnalyzeText.html


___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________

At 10:51 AM -0800 2/19/08, Randy B. Singer wrote:
>On Feb 19, 2008, at 3:04 AM, David Clark wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for decent and cheap Concordance software for Mac that
>> will create a full concordance of a large PDF.
>
>Concorder (free)
>http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/concorder/concorder.html
>
>Concorder Pro (free)
>http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/concorderPro/concorderPro.html
>
>AnalyzeText ($49)
>http://www.wuffwuffware.com/products/AnalyzeText.html

I love the fact that Randy gives us the Mac answer of three programs
whereas Curtis gives us the 40 line Unix answer.. (No offense to
either Curtis or Randy.) This is a reminder that there is always more
than three ways to skin a cat. A fact I find very useful to mention
when disciplining felines.

But seriously, this is an example of the beauty of modern Macs!

Cheers
~Nick
http://www.inmff.net

On Feb 19, 2008, at 10:51 AM, Randy B. Singer wrote:

> Concorder (free)
> http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/concorder/concorder.html
>
> Concorder Pro (free)
> http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/concorderPro/
> concorderPro.html
>
> AnalyzeText ($49)
> http://www.wuffwuffware.com/products/AnalyzeText.html
>
>
> I tried concordance pro on a large pdf. First, it won't take the
> full 16-page document but apparently requires page-by-page copy
> paste. Then, the only "concordance" I got was the file name and
> frequency of occurrence of individual words. There does not seem
> to be any way to place them in the entire document. There is no
> page index.

I guess what I'm trying to do is create a detailed index after the
fact when the original author failed to do so. For example, in
several hundred pages of related PDFs, each of which is a separate
document, where do I find "tool" or "Exhibit" or "damage" or "mold"
or whatever single word. I know one can search in Preview for
individual words, but it requires going through separate documents
one by one. I still do not know how to take the result from Preview
and copy>paste it to something else, and searching the Preview help
does not seem to disclose any way to do that.

I'll try wuffwuffware.com next.

Dave Clark
http://home.earthlink.net/~dc1999/
http://web.mac.com/dave28c
http://www.clarklawfirm.com

I'm sure this is not the concordance style you were looking for, but this is an incredible, interactive visualization tool for doing work for which a concordance might be a more primitive tool:

http://www.textarc.org/

It shows all the words in entire text on the screen twice. Once as a ribbon around the perimeter and again with words positioned within at the "center of gravity" of the occurrences in the perimeter. click on a word in the interior and arcs are shown to the locations on the perimeter. It can also "read" the text showing arcs to successive words wherever they occur.

Let me recommend SpotInside from http://www.oneriver.jp/SpotInside/index.html

It won't build an index but it will search and display in context any word you care to look for. If you used Concorder to reveal a complete list of all words you could scan it for relevant ones and then use SpotInside to show each occurrence in context without opening each document.