Appleworks Content Searches

Rick

Check at Hard Disk/Library/ Spotlight.

I have an AppleWorksm.mdimporter there, which implies that Spotlight should be able to do content searches if that is present. I don't use AW any more (no have for years, so I don't know how effective it is.

No idea where I got it, must have been part of the install.

Regards

TD

The mdimporter should allow the Appleworks content to be added to the Spotlight content index database. When I ask Spotlight to find "Prescription Prices" the top hit is an Appleworks document from December 2002.
Francine

Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Hi Rick,
A couple of other things occurred to me:

1. Spotlight only indexes something like the first 2000 unique words in a document. So if you are looking for something in a large doc near the end it might not show up--my docs are in the 5 to 10 pages range.

2. If you have a folder with quite a few of your docs in it you might try to reindex just that folder--put it into the Privacy pane of the Spotlight System Prefs, leave it for a brief time, then delete it from Privacy and wait a bit for it to reindex--and see if that helps.

While I was futzing around I created a new, and very short document, and it appeared almost immediately. You might try re-saving something with a distinctive word in it and see if that shows up. You would then at least know whether your importer is working.
Francine

Francine


Francine
Schwieder

<Spotlight only indexes something like the first 2000 unique words in a document. So if you are looking for something in a large doc near the end it might not show up>

Francine, thanks for revealing that unannounced limitation.

SO maybe that's why so many people are unable to find things.

I mean, of all the people most likely to be searching for a particular word or phrase within a document, are academics, authors, journalists, translators, all of whom habitually write, or need to consult, documents that are much, much longer than 2000 words (or even "unique" words).

This renders Spotlight completely useless for such users.

I was already open-mouthed about the inherent unreliabilty of Spotlight's indexing system. Now that I discover Apple have tried to make it work better by limiting what it searches (and not telling anyone) my jaw is about to drop off completely. This is as close to dishonesty as it is possible to get without actually telling lies.

Tom

The key word here is 'unique', it's a big difference from 2,000 words.

Only the first 2000 unique terms of each file are indexed. During this process, a file's text is processed into "terms." This means they are forced to all lower-case, and they may be "stemmed" by removing certain grammatical endings. Thus "BROTHERS", "brother", "Brother's", and "Brother" would be considered the same term, "brother."
"Unique" means that for purposes of the 2000-term limit, each term is only counted the first time it is found. So the indexing process does not stop after the first 2000 terms of a file, but rather when its vocabulary exceeds 2000 terms.
Very few natural language documents have a vocabulary in excess of 2000 words, so this limitation should not hinder you in normal usage. If you were to index a dictionary of the English language, for example, most of it would not be indexed. The same is true of documents containing long lists of names.

That's from http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106986

Oh, and that's from before Spotlight. 10.2 to be precise.

Regards

TD

MacBook Pro 15 2.16gig / iMac G5 20 Mac OS X (10.4) 2 gig RAM/ 1 gig RAM

Right, and will it correctly index accented words in any language? Will it find ANY word in the 165,000-word Italian book I am translating?

I don't trust that it will. Professional death for me. Sorry.

Tom

I merely wrote to clarify the distinction between 2,000 words and 2,000 unique words.

Good luck with the book you're translating.

Regards

TD