Re: [Tockit-general] Docco-0.3

[Peter B. <pe...@pe...>]

Hi Bobby,

Bobby wrote:

> Thank you for this neat program! I have been researching the best 
> method of implementing this kind of application, but it looks like I 
> no longer need to worry about that. My last idea was to adapt a web 
> crawler to a local application.
>
> Docco does just about everything I need. I collect news and other 
> information for use in my own work as a writer and publisher of a 
> website. I need to access a large amount of this form of data, way 
> beyond the capability of any file browser, and yet that's all I could 
> find until now.

Thanks for the praise :-)

>
> I downloaded the program and the two available plugins (pdfbox and 
> poi). I had the .bat extension associated with my text editor 
> (Crimson), so when I tried to run it, it just opened instead in the 
> editor. Once I fixed that, the program launched and ran as advertised.
>
> However I do have one small problem that you may be able to offer some 
> advice on. When I try to open a file from the tree list, I get a DOS 
> window which immediately closes, and the expected application never 
> opens at all.
>
> The directory I indexed contains mostly .html with some .pdf however, 
> in the tree list, all files have the same Windows default icon, which 
> might be the best clue. For some reason, the file type isn't being 
> recognized.
>
> I'm still running Windows 98SE which is likely the real problem. I've 
> been trying to migrate to Linux but haven't succeeded yet.
>
> Do you have anything to offer on this?

I just browsed for some information on this. We use a little Java class 
called Browserlauncher, which does not seem to be maintained anymore. 
But some people reported that problem you describe on Win9x/ME in the 
bug tracker (it is a project on Sourceforge). I tried to apply that 
patch but since I long left DOS-based Windows, I can't test it.

Can you download this:
  http://kvo.itee.uq.edu.au/~pbecker/ToscanaJ.jar

and replace the ToscanaJ.jar in Docco's libs with that? Does that help?

>
> Perhaps an idea for further development, would be a small "thumbnail" 
> like viewer that would show the first paragraph for example, as you 
> select a document from the tree. Or, alternatively a scrollable list 
> of such sampled text from the documents in the tree list. Locating a 
> particular document in this way would be much faster than loading each 
> document one by one into an application.

We can think about that. It implies either storing this information in 
the index (which normally does store which words are contained in a 
document, but not their order) or re-reading the document again. But 
that wouldn't be too hard and I agree that this could be a handy little 
feature.

  Peter