You seem to be saying that if DT allows escaping of characters such as * then it’s AI features should also allow the same which would be an added advantage. Or am I misunderstanding?
At it’s most basic I believe that the issue that is being raised here is that the Search function in DT is more limited than users expect and would like. Most users, myself included would consider Search to be more basic than the AI features of DT and we therefore logically expect more of it.
My own belief is that one should be able to search for ANY string regardless of whether it contains some characters whcih carry special meaning for the application itself. That is why many packages and systems allow for escaping characters to deal with this problem as described by myself and Jim in our previous messages. Other deficiencies in Search have been highlighted elsewhere in the forums such as not being able to search by creation/modification date or label etc. Speaking from my own point of view I would prefer a more comprehensive Search/Find feature as I do not use any of the AI functionality.
Please don’t get me wrong, I think DT is great and I use it constantly. I feel however that this is an area of the application that would benefit from some enhancement and it is clear from postings in this and other threads that others feel the same. It is striking that there seems to be realatively little traffic concerning modifications to the AI functionality in DT perhaps indicating that area is in some sense more complete.
No, that’s not what I meant. I’ve been playing around with the Concordance, which is a fundamental building block of the DT/DT Pro database. The Concordance is a list of all the text strings of 3 alphanumeric characters or more (default) that are in the database. One can search for any text string in the Concordance. There’s a brief description of the Concordance in the Help guide.
Some characters can’t be searched for in the Concordance. Among these are “*”, “#” and “^”. Nor will the Search tool search for these characters.
As a practical matter, many users want the ability to mark text, e.g., to remind them to go back and finish editing or writing a section. It’s useful to be able to search for those markers across the database. So one needs to choose for the marker a text string that will be searchable. Also, I’d like it to show up for a document if I press the Words button, so to be on the safe side I use a 3-character string, “zdt”, which is unique in my database and fairly easy to type quickly. Something such as “ßßß” also works well; thanks, Maria, I may switch to that one, or use it as a different marker.
Those of you familiar with DEVONagent and/or the current version of EasyFind know that DEVONtechnologies has extremely sophisticated search operators in those applications, really Big League. (Yes, EasyFind can search for its own search operator symbols in text.) The search operators in DT/DT Pro are much simpler and have been optimized for speed. But future versions will include more sophisticated search operators. By the way, you may notice that the Search tool now lets you filter searches based on State and Label, which can add lots of logical power. When this thread started, that State and Label filtering had not yet been added.
