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Pick List (and Word List Managers)

The Pick List and the Stop List use a similar Word List Manager. The Pick List allows you to list words which will be picked when you make a Fast Concordance.  A Fast Concordance is by definition selective: it picks only the words you list and omits all others.  

An empty Pick List would produce an empty concordance, and the program will warn you if the Pick List is empty.

To prepare or edit a Pick List, choose Edit Pick List from the Text menu, or press the Edit button next to Pick List in the Make Fast Concordance dialog.

To use a Pick List, first make sure it contains the words you want, one word per line.  Then on the File menu choose Make Fast Concordance from Files or Make Fast Concordance from Clipboard. In the Fast Concordance dialog, look at Word Selection Method and ensure Pick List is selected.

A Pick List should consist of words, one per line. Words may include the pattern-matching symbols (wildcards)  ?, standing for any one letter, and * , standing for any number of any letters. See below under 'Selecting words using patterns'.  

If you choose the option Treat Upper and Lower Case Separately (on the Text menu under Special) and then use the Pick List to make a Fast Concordance, the words picked from your text will be those which are a case-sensitive match with the words in the Pick List.  In this case, if you wanted to pick both 'a' and 'A', they would need separate enties in the Pick List.


The Word List Managers

The Pick List Manager and the Stop List Manager work identically.

The Pick and Stop List Managers are text editors. As from Version 3.0 of Concordance there is no limit to the number of words they can contain, even on Windows 95/98/ME.

As well as adding words yourself or reading words in from a file, you can use their special abilities to 
  • Format one word per line
  • Re-sort the list of words, keeping duplicates
  • Re-sort the list of words, removing duplicates

    When you press 'Re-sort, keeping duplicates', a window will open showing all the duplicate words found. 

    The option to remove duplicates works regardless of their case - so 'This', 'this', and 'THIS' will be recognised as duplicates.

    Menu Commands

    Most commands on the menus are self-explanatory file and edit commands.  One or two need explanation:

    File menu: Append words from file lets you read any text file on disk and splits it up into one word per line.  

    View menu: Left, Right, Centre:  You can detect any leading or trailing spaces by switching from left to right alignment and vice-versa.  Don't ask what the use of Centre is. It's there because it's there.

    Options menu: User-defined Alphabet: Lets you choose whether to use the Alphabet defined in the Alphabet dialog when reading in a file and splitting words one per line.  If this option is on, all characters not in your chosen Alphabet will be removed entirely from words.  This is useful for removing punctuation and other symbols from text, leaving only words.  If this option is off, the default alphabet (a..z, A..Z, 0..9, plus hyphen and apostrophe) is used.  Note that the Pick and Stop Lists do not make any use of the definable word separators in the Alphabet dialog, only its characters.

    The Edit Alphabet button - if you have chosen User-defined Alphabet on the Options menu, you may wish to alter the Alphabet. This button simply opens the Alphabet dialog, normally accessible from the Text menu.  


    Advanced use

    The Pick and Stop List Managers can be used as a miniature text analysis program on their own.  By reading a file of continuous text, splitting it into one word per line, and sorting it with duplicates removed, they can create a sorted list of the unique words in a text.  This list can be saved to a file if wanted.


    Selecting words using patterns

    In the Pick List you can use pattern-matching symbols (wildcards) ?, standing for any one letter, and *, standing for any number of any letters.  

    You can combine these to produce powerful selection criteria:

    To do this:      Type this:

    Select all words of a certain length  
       e.g. words of 4 characters:    ????

    Select all words greater than a 
        certain length  
        e.g. words of 4 characters and over  ????*

    Select words beginning with a prefix
       e.g. words beginning with 'un-'    un*

    Select words ending with a suffix
      e.g. words ending in '-ing'    *ing

    Select words which begin with 
      'un' and end with 'ing'     un*ing

    Select all words which contain 
         the letter 'e'     *e* 

    Select all words     *
    (this matches any word and so would produce the same result as a Full Concordance, but more slowly!)



    Pick List Files

    When you first open the Pick List Manager, it opens a Pick List file called Picklist.txt if that file exists in the same folder as the program itself. (It should do, because it was placed there by the installation.) Picklist.txt is a short sample file.  You can create any number of your own Pick List files and they do not have to be called Picklist.txt. 

    Use the commands on the Pick List Manager's File menu to create new Pick List files or save a Pick List file under a different name.  If you want a different Pick List file to be loaded automatically when you open the Pick List Manager, use Choose Pick List File on the Options menu and also tick the Auto-load Pick List File option.

    On a shared network installation, your system administrator should give you your own copy of Picklist.txt.

    See also:  Make Fast Concordance