Thread View: comp.text.desktop
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Started by Warren Murray
Fri, 17 Dec 1999 00:00
HELP: Making a library from text files
Author: Warren Murray
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 00:00
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 00:00
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My newspaper can export page content from QuarkXpress as text files (one story = one file) using Press2Go. But we have no way of indexing and archiving it into a searchable library/database. Can anyone suggest a suitable solution, preferably Macintosh-based - bearing in mind that cost and minimising storage space are factors? The software would be required to handle a large amount of text. Preferably it would also be able to automatically reformat text to take out extraneous characters such as carriage/fixed returns. I imagine we would be using server space or a Zip drive as the storage medium. Please e-mail me directly if you can help, Thank you, -- Warren Murray <elefantman@ozemail.com.au>
Re: HELP: Making a library from text files
Author: David Rouse
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 00:00
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 00:00
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In article <38598D55.EDD9C5DB@ozemail.com.au>, Warren Murray <elefantman@ozemail.com.au> wrote: >My newspaper can export page content from QuarkXpress as text files (one >story = one file) using Press2Go. But we have no way of indexing and >archiving it into a searchable library/database. What we did is create a MacPerl script to turn the text files into basic HTML files. Really just adding the '< P >' code to the end of paragraphs and adding HTML headers and footers and .html to the end of the file names. Then we set up an internal web site with folders by week, month and year for all these text files. The idea is to set up a searchable internal web site, since this is something most people are familiar with. You have a couple of choices for software: * You can get Mac based web servers for free. Then we set up and indexing cgi so that people could do web based searches of the file collection. Apple had a search cgi who's name excapes me right now but that is available for free as well (or was available). * AppleShareIP can do indexing for web searches, but this costs money. * WebStar also has a search engine (I think), but this costs money. * Unix + Apache + Excite for web servers (or some other free web indexing and search tool), which is can be free (Linux instead of a commercial Unix) but not Mac-based. * Virginia Systems (there are other text indexing companies) has text indexing software that can be web based and even includes a quark module so you could archive and search whole quark pages (I think). But this costs money, indeed it might be the most expensive. We did choice one for a while and it worked, we would have moved up to choice three (we didn't really need all the services that ASIP include) but then we found an unused Unix box and fitted it with apache and excite for web servers. This has worked well for us, we have text going back to 1995 and the searches are still fast. But if I had a spare Mac I'd probably get the commercial version of WebStar (make sure they reall do indexing and searches) and start an internal web server. We even use our server now for stuff like announcements, in-house instruction manuals and we are looking at web based group calendars. Cool stuff! By the way, eight newsgroups is way too much. I've shortened the list and set a followup-to to alt.publish.newspaper. DRouse
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