NEAR/BEFORE/AFTER searches: Highlighting their occurrences?

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi there,
when run a search with NEAR/BEFORE/AFTER delimiters, I want to see specifically where the NEAR/BEFORE/AFTER hits appear in a document.

But the documents have all the words in the search higlighted, regardless of the NEAR/BEFORE/AFTER restrictions.

I’m probably doing something silly then, but how do I just jump to the NEAR/BEFORE/AFTER hit(s) or clusters in a document?

Thanks for any help :smiley:

2

bump :slight_smile:

3

You will find this issue has been raised a number of times on the forum, if you do a search.

The general answer: highlighting only the words in a ‘proximity pair’ presents non-trivial logical problems. I’ve seen search routines that attempt to overcome them, but none that have succeeded.

4

Thanks for that, I appreciate it.

You’re right: there’ve been people asking for proximity highlighting going back to at least 2008, which is why I thought I’d add this post for others searching in the future: I’ve actually found some software that does it, does it well - and it’s free!

It’s called DocFetcher, and is cross-platform too:

docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html

By ramping up the RAM allocation somewhat, DocFetcher was easily able to index dozens of OCR’d versions of 18th century books (many over 1GB in size), and will run any number of different kinds of searches, including fuzzy and proximity - and show just those specific results in the viewing window below. It’s awesome really, perhaps worth mentioning in future :smiley:

5

The tricky logical highlighting issues with pairs of proximity operator terms don’t go away. They may not be apparent in simple cases, but can emerge in real-world search criteria settings.

DocFetcher isn’t immune to those problems. :slight_smile: