[Corpora-List] summary: problem with WordSmith Tools

[Veronika Koller]

Dear list members,
last wheek I posted the following question: 

>has anyone come across the problem described below and found a solution to
it?

>Whenever I want to save a concordance as a txt or Word file, copy and
paste it to Word or the Editor, and even >when expanding concordance lines,
the node word changes to seemingly anywhere in the text, making it
mpossible >to properly work with attested results. 

I was much impressed by the prompt and numerous replies. I would like to
thank the following people for rushing to help: 

Linda Bawcom
Lee Davidson
Sarolta Godnic
Rafa³ L. Górski
Jasper Holmes
Tony Jappy
Janice McAlpine
Adriane Orenha
Gaby Saldanha
Oliver Strunk
Elisa Duarte Teixeira
Christopher Tribble
Andrius Utka

Almost everybody (e.g., Linda Bawcom) mentioned that they were familiar
with the bui. My hope is that it will have been removed from WordSmith
Tools 4.0 - does anyone know where we stand on that one?). In fact, Andrius
Utka informed me that 

>You cannot avoid it when you change *cnc format to *txt. In such cases you
can put your own highlight in Word, 
>using Find "node" and Replace into format "bold".
>In order to have your node less or more in the centre you need to make a
line fit per one line (not word->wrapped), which can be achieved by several
ways: you can either make your margins smaller, or change your page >size
from portrait to landscape, or make your font smaller, or make your lines
shorter when you save them in >WS. Then select all and centre it.

Gaby Saldanha and Jasper Holmes mentioned no problems pasting concordance
lines to the notepad and saving them as .txt (the option referred to by
Adriane Orenha), but Jasper Holmes conceded that loss of proper alignment 

>has happenend to me when expanding lines, but only if I click the icon to
expand when the concordancer has >just finished. What I do is first make
sure that just one of the concordance entries is selected (using the >mouse
or the cursor keys). Then this doesn't happen.

Further, Lee Davidson reminded me to check 
>whether Version 3.0 is actually recognizing sentence boundaries when the
marker occurs at the end of a line?

In addition, Oliver Strunk pointed out the option "Characters to be 'saved
as text'", which can be found in the settings menu, and suggested that
adjusting here might make a difference (it didn't when I tried it, though).  

Another solution seems to be to change the font to Courier 9, as proposed
by Sarolta Godnic and Chris Tribble. Here's what the latter wrote:  

>Wordsmith displays text in a proportional font (usually ariel). When pasting
>into Word, use a small fixed space font like Courier New 9pt.  The node
>should then be in the right place.  I add a "concordance line" style to my
>Normal.dot and apply this to this sort of text.  I also usually set the page
>orientation to landscape.

I'm sure that works - only it doesn't on my computer, for whatever reason. 

Tony Jappy had yet another suggestion for exporting comncordance lines:

>What you do is select your concordance results or what ever and copy them
to the clipboard. You then have to >copy it to Word using the "special
paste" (...). Your concordance is saved to the clipboard as a bitmap file
>and so is seen by Word as an image.
>Another solution is to save your piece of concordance to the clipboard,
open up Paint  and paste it into a new >bitmap file. This you can either
convert to a jpeg using an image processin program (Lview?) or insert as is 
>into most modern wordprocessors.

Elisa Teixeira's solution did the trick in my case: 

>- select the lines / columns you want
>- in "File", select "Copy" 
>- in the pop-up screen choose "clipboard"
>- open a blank word file
>- in "Edit", choose "paste special" (2nd option) (...) 
>(if some letters miss their endings or beginings, just enlarge the margins
a little bit. If it's too small - >not enough words - you should go to
settings and rise up the number of words you want in the concordance lines
>and do all this process again)


Apart from the alignment problem, Janice McAlpine also expressed her
opinion that 

>it would be a real help if Wordsmith Tools allowed one to jump into files
attached to concordance lines at the >point of the hit to do more
investigating and/or cutting and pasting.

And finally, for those who've given up on WordSmith Tools altogether, Rafa³
L. Górski (RafalG at ijp-pan.krakow.pl) pointed out ConcApp as a viable
alternative.


Thanks again and best regards,
Veronika Koller
Mag.a Veronika Koller
Department of English/Business English
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Augasse 9
A-1090 Vienna
Tel.: 43/1/31336-4068
Fax: 43/1/31336-747