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Preparing text

You can make a concordance to any plain text file, often called an ASCII file. If the file displays correctly in the File Viewer, it will probably be suitable.

If your text is in a word processor, you can save it as a plain text file and use that to make the concordance from. (In Microsoft Word, save your file as 'Text Only with Line Breaks'. In Word 2002, an option to save a file as text with line breaks does not appear when you choose 'Save as...''  Instead, you can choose to save as Plain Text; an additional dialog will then appear which allows you to select an option to 'insert line breaks'.) 

Alternatively, you can simply display your document in your word processor, select all the text, and copy it to the Clipboard, where Concordance will see it immediately. You can do the same with many other Windows programs.

For best results, make sure that each line is no longer than is comfortable for human beings to read: see Input Text File Format.  Don't split words across line-breaks - Concordance is happy to handle hyphenated words, but each part of the word must be on the same line.

You can also make a concordance to the text in a HTML file - see the Ignore topic for an example.  For fuller technical details, including information about analysing SGML files, see Input Text File Format. 

If the text you want to work with seems to contain strange characters, see Character Sets.  

Before you make a concordance you should set options which relate to the features of your source text and the way you want it to be read.  These options are all on the Text menu:
  • Alphabet
  • References
  • Context Styles
  • Text to Read and Ignore

    Once you have set these options, you are ready to make a concordance. Choose Make Full Concordance or Make Fast Concordance on the File menu. The concordance will be made and displayed.

    All the above options on the Text menu affect the way the source text is read while constructing the concordance. Consequently if you decide to make changes to any of these options, you need to re-make the concordance to see the effect of the changes.

    By contrast, items on other menus allow you to alter the concordance after it has been constructed and see the changes immediately. See Changing What's Displayed for some of them.

    Considerations when preparing text

    A common reason for difficulty when analysing e-text is that the text has been prepared using the same symbol or character with more than one meaning.  For example, if you use an apostrophe to denote a possessive (as in English father's), but also use it to denote a closing speech mark (as in He said 'Yes'), nothing you do in Concordance will be able to tell them apart. Another instance would be using a double hyphen to stand for a dash.

    The answer is to edit your text using characters in ways which are not ambiguous.

    Another important point to bear in mind when marking up text is this: later in your project, it is easy to ignore information you no longer need, but much harder to include information you forgot to add in the first place.  

    Related topics