FoxTrot Search Forum
FoxTrot Search for macOS Forum

Home » Public Forums » FoxTrot Search User Forum » Highlighting text, adding notes to PDFs in the FoxTrot preview (Feature suggestion)
Highlighting text, adding notes to PDFs in the FoxTrot preview [message #1132] Wed, 06 January 2021 01:33 Go to next message
DR
Messages: 3
Registered: July 2020
Junior Member
I found FoxTrot a convenient way to read multiple PDF documents (after finding the right ones; in working with scientific papers, there can be dozens found); however I constantly forget that it (apparently) cannot create highlights and notes, so I select a chunk of text only to be reminded of that. Opening new Preview windows breaks the flow and defeats the neatness of having one application window.

It is understood that FoxTrot works with multiple document types, and for most, adding this feature would be non-trivial, besides being very rarely needed. But it would be most useful for PDFs, and simple to add given that the format supports it.

Re: Highlighting text, adding notes to PDFs in the FoxTrot preview [message #1324 is a reply to message #1132] Sun, 26 December 2021 11:51 Go to previous messageGo to next message
flyingmonkey
Messages: 1
Registered: December 2021
Junior Member
This is also the feature I want most. Reading PDF by using keyword search while being able to highlight or write comments directly in the preview. Currently you have to open the PDF, then search within it again, and then locate the place to be highlighted.
Re: Highlighting text, adding notes to PDFs in the FoxTrot preview [message #1439 is a reply to message #1324] Tue, 10 May 2022 22:51 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Grant Barrett
Messages: 24
Registered: October 2019
Junior Member
I would also like to +1 this feature request, with an addition.

If I am searching for

wordone wordtwo
and wordtwo is far more common, the excerpt listing will mainly just show hits on wordtwo. However, since I want both wordone AND wordtwo, I would like a way to tell Foxtrot that I prefer to weight all hits on wordone as more important, to prioritize showing those excerpts of wordone near wordtwo, and to prioritize showing wordone on its own.
Re: Highlighting text, adding notes to PDFs in the FoxTrot preview [message #1442 is a reply to message #1439] Wed, 11 May 2022 14:59 Go to previous message
FoxTrot Engineering
Messages: 383
Registered: April 2020
Senior Member
You pretty precisely describe how excerpts are currently implemented: FoxTrot chooses the excerpt of 21 consecutive words that have the highest weight; rare words (relative to the whole index, not to the document) having more weight than frequent words.

Thus typically, if wordone is far less common than wordtwo, the excerpt should contain at least one occurrence of wordone. Except maybe if an excerpt can be found with 3 or more occurrences of wordtwo, but none of wordone.

However, maybe your column layout is not wide enough to display the excerpt entirely, and you only see its beginning which does not necessarily contain wordone?

We could maybe add a preference to change the length (number of words) of excerpts, or compute an arbitrary length based on the width of the excerpt column, instead of always showing excerpts of 21 words (but this wont guaranty that the excerpt won't be truncated).


Jérôme - FoxTrot Engineering
Previous Topic: How to match single wild character in Foxtrot Query?
Next Topic: Rtfd file type
Goto Forum:
  


Current Time: Fri Mar 29 00:13:23 GMT+1 2024