Some of these features have been asked for before (by me, even!), but now that 2.0 is officially out (and congratulations on that!), I was hoping to bring some attention to these again. I have a research project coming up where I am going to be extracting word-frequency data from hundreds of texts, and in many ways DTP is the ideal application in which to do this. It’s super fast, runs on my Mac without virtualization, and handles PDFs easily. (Finding another program that has these 3 features, even when ignoring the second item, is not easy!)
So what’s missing?
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The ability to do a concordance on a folder or subfolder vs. the whole database. This isn’t a show stopper, because you can use separate databases for this. However there are advantages to being able to do a whole-database as well as a subset (folder) concordance, so this would be a nice addition.
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Being able to manipulate a stop list. This one is really the important one. A stop list allows you to say “ignore these words” when you do a concordance. DTP already allows you to ignore words under a certain length, but more control is needed. DevonAgent, I think (I don’t own it), has a built-in stop list of very common words (a, an, the; etc.) but even if DTP had that list (and it doesn’t seem to) that wouldn’t be enough for my purposes (and perhaps for others). I’m going to need to ignore certain words that aren’t on traditional stop lists (e.g., in a biology text I may want to ignore complex words that aren’t biology-specific). I know there are ways that this can be done with taking the concordance list out of DTP, but doing it within the program would help greatly. (As would a “go list” feature that looks for a specific list of words ignoring all others, but one step at a time, right?)
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Finally being able to see a list of all occurrences of a single word with the surrounding sentence included would be very helpful (again, doesn’t DevonAgent do something like this for web results?). This feature is often called Key Words in Context (KWIC). Could a script do something like this?
Anyway, that’s my request. There are other programs that can do this, but nothing that has the elegance or speed of DTP; and nothing at all on the Mac. With these added features, DTP could really become quite the text analysis tool.
Doug