Concordance software: Version History
Version 3.2 - December 2004
Various new features plus lots of bug fixes
New features and improvements:
XP Appearance - Concordance now uses Windows XP appearance when running on XP
Quicker and easier installation - New installer and smaller download size
Navigate through source text - New navigation buttons in the text viewer let you skip through your source text to the next or previous occurrence of a word. Highlighted words now appear in the centre of the viewer or editor window.
Handle split words as in Version 2.0.0 - Compatibility mode for the way words are split when non-word characters come in the middle of them.
New user preferences - Preferences dialog (on the Tools menu) is reorganised and has a new option: Show Progress Messages and Warnings - Previous versions of Concordance showed all progress messages while a concordance was being made. Instead of 'All' you can now choose 'High Priority only' to suppress the Progress dialog unless significant warnings occur.
Improvements to Help - changes and additions, including: - additional Frequently Asked Questions - updated macro to add page references to Microsoft Word files - The help file which accompanies Web Concordances is revised and now opens in a new browser page by itself, instead of in the Web Concordance frameset.
Pick and Stop List improvement - In the Pick List and Stop List Managers, when you press 'Re-sort, keeping duplicates', a window will open showing all the duplicate words found.
Clearer controls - Choose Lemma file', formerly on Lemmatiser's Options menu, is now simply 'Open' on Lemmatiser's File menu. - 'Choose Pick List file', formerly on the Pick List's Options menu, is now simply 'Open' on the Pick List Manager's File menu. Same for the Stop List. - In the 'Make Concordance from Files' dialog, the controls to generate filename references are labelled in a less confusing way. Also the file list now re-sizes when the dialog is re-sized.
Better warnings - A warning is now given if the same characters are chosen for Skip Markers and Reference Markers. - A warning is given when a word in the Lemmatiser appears again as a child of itself. Earlier versions produced an 'access violation' error.
Speed - 'Display while Loading' (on the File menu) is now turned off by default for a new installation. On faster recent computers, this setting should subjectively improve performance when loading big concordances. - On the Headwords menu, setting or clearing 'Read-only' is now many times quicker than before.
Bugs fixed:
- Fixed bug which truncated huge texts passed via the Windows Clipboard.
- Fixed bug which caused program to hang when searching for the phrase * * (two asterisk wildcards).
- Fixed bug which introduced undisplayable characters (like empty squares) in Web Concordances in place of references in the HTML version of the source text.
- Fixed 'Access violation' in the Lemmatiser when a word appeared again as a child of itself.
- Fixed occasional corruption of .INI file by addition of many blank lines, leading to user settings not being correctly restored.
- Fixed bug whereby 'Make Full Concordance from Clipboard' could produce no output if run after an error had occurred during 'Make Fast Concordance from Clipboard'.
- Fixed bug which could cause deleted context lines to re-appear and lines not deleted to disappear.
- Fixed 'Access violation' after deleting a Headword which had had context lines deleted.
- Fixed bugs in display of contexts with 'Analyse characters instead of words'.
- Fixed minor bugs in HTML generation, e.g. < / a > appearing in the Wordlist of a Web Concordance.
- Fixed some unwanted changes of sort order when changing views.
- Numerous other smaller bugs fixed.
Version 3.1 was an internal version, not released.
Version 3.0 - 19 January 2002
Many new features and improvements:
Five new ways of selecting words
Phrases. Find all instances of up to six phrases in your text.
Proximity. Find words within a specified distance of other words.
Samples. Pick random or consecutive samples of words.
Regular Expressions. Powerful pattern-matching.
References. Select words by their speaker, page number, section, or any other references you define in your text.Make Indexes
Book-like indexing - words and a list of their locations, with no contexts.
More control over words
Treat upper and lower case separately - avoid normalising words to upper case when reading your text.
Show duplicate words separately - display all instances of headwords in the wordlist, instead of aggregating them.
Analyse characters instead of words.New ways of sorting
Sort headwords by order of occurrence.
Sort word endings using a string (as opposed to word) sort.
Sort contexts by string before and string after headword.Improved language support
Non-Latin languages are better handled, especially with Windows 2000/XP.
Language and Font Control is re-designed.
See also Instructions for concordancing East Asian E-Texts using Concordance by Professor Marjorie Chan, Ohio State University. Gives full details of using Concordance 3.0 to handle Chinese, Japanese, and Korean texts on Windows 2000/XP.Improved display and control
Clicking on a context line now locates the exact word in the full-text view.
Better control over fitting context column widths to their contents: three new menu options under 'Fit Columns to Contents' on the Contexts menu.New file conversion tool: Filter a File
Filter a File lets you use Concordance's text processing power to produce a transformed text file instead of a concordance.
User-definable HTML entity translation
Full control over conversion between Windows characters and HTML entities (special characters) during both input and output.
Speed improvements
Concordance now reads text faster, sorts faster, and loads concordances faster. In particular, very large concordances are now loaded in time directly proportional to size instead of getting progressively slower with size, provided 'Display while loading' is off.
New file format
Backward compatibility: Version 3 of Concordance can read files made with earlier versions. You can re-open them as often as you like, and even make changes such as deleting headwords or contexts, but you won't be able to save the changes. You will be reminded of this when you open the concordance. It is easy to update old concordance files. Just re-make the concordance. (That is, make a concordance to your text over again with Version 3.)
Minor changes and bugs fixed
- Hot Tracking in Wordlist can now be turned on and off. It was always on in Version 2, and is now off by default.
- Fixed bug which reported "File not open" when adding files with long lines to the list of files to make a concordance from.
- Fixed buglet where non-concordance files could get into the recently-used list.
- Fixed bug which produced incorrect width in Save as Text with contexts of selected length.
- Made the Stop button more responsive during a lengthy sort.
- The chosen state of the option 'User-defined alphabet' is now correctly saved in the Pick List and Stop List.
- A large number of other minor improvements.
Version 2.0.0 - 18 December 2000
- Lemmatiser - Lets you group together any words you choose. So you could have all instances of 'am, 'was', 'were', etc., gathered under 'be' - or all instances of 'vote', election', bribe', gathered under 'democracy'. Includes a powerful Outliner for easy management of lemma lists.
- Concordances from other Windows programs - Instantly make a concordance from text on the Windows Clipboard. So you can have a document open in Word, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Acrobat Reader, an SGML viewer, or any Windows application that can copy ANSI text to the Clipboard, and make a concordance to the text immediately.
- Multiple input files - Can make one concordance from many input files.
- Stop List - Lets you specify words to be omitted from your concordance.
- Word List Manager - for easy construction of Stop Lists and Pick Lists. This is also a useful general tool: it can read any plain text file, put each word on a separate line, sort them, and remove duplicates - a miniature Word Index program in its own right. (Limited file size under Windows 95/98, no limit under Windows NT4.0, 2000, and XP)
- Contexts - Better control over contexts, including ability to delete individual contexts, and to limit the number of contexts displayed
- Easier Alphabet control - Characters you've omitted from your user-defined Alphabet can now be added automatically as your text is read
- Web Concordances - Word frequencies and percentages can be added to the Wordlist frame in a Web Concordance
- Improvements to the stand-alone Text Editor and File Browser
- Help system - Many additions, including Frequently Asked Questions
- Performance - Program uses less RAM and starts up faster
- Better error reporting - Proper English error messages for some common errors such as 'File in use by another program' and 'Disk full'.
- Plus many, many bug fixes and minor improvements.
Version 1.1.3 - 11 April 1999
New features:
Fixes:
- Added option to write plain text links (as third alternative to buttons and to text with images) in Web Concordances
- Consequent re-design of HTML Setup dialog
- The program is now more tolerant of control characters in the input text
- Some HTML Setup options were not being saved to the .Ini file; fixed.
Version 1.1.2 - 29 March 1999
This release fixed a number of bugs; it did not add any new functionality.
Users upgrading from a version earlier than 1.1.2 are recommended to delete their Concordance.ini file (in the Windows folder) when upgrading. As this will cause the program to forget your recent settings, you might want to note down your settings first by looking in various dialog boxes, such as all four on the Text menu and also HTML Setup on the File menu.
- Fixed bug causing slow loading of concordance after unloading a concordance while percentage display is on
- Disallowed two simultaneous instances of print preview form
- Fixed frame targetting for 'Made with Concordance' message
- Fixed bug which was allowing CR/LF and other non-alphabetic characters in Alphabet Editor, corrupting alphabet
- Fixed bug which corrupted alphabet after an attempt to load an invalid concordance file
- Fixed bug which converted Web Concordance source text to HTML even when it already was HTML, and which did not allow selection of preformatted text, as opposed to tables, for layout of a Web Concordance
- Additions to help file
Version 1.1.1 - not generally released
Version 1.1.0 - 31 January 1999
- Added ability to view Collocations for up to four words left and right of any headword.
- Added ability to sort contexts by any of the four words to left and right of the headword.
- Fixed bug where File|New in the editor would replace any unsaved file without warning.
- Several minor cosmetic bugs fixed.
Version 1.0.0 - 19 January 1999
First public release.
Comments or questions: R.J.C.Watt
