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Secondary Search not working! [message #406] Wed, 27 July 2016 17:44 Go to next message
Luke Thompson
Messages: 3
Registered: July 2016
Junior Member
Currently using Foxtrot Professional, v. 5.5.5 build 1423 on a Mac (OS X El
Capitan v. 10.11.6). I am having a problem that I also encountered with
Foxtrot Personal Search, and that is that the secondary search (the
drop-down menu that displays the actual lines of text in which the search
terms appear, with the search terms highlighted) works for some files but
not for others. When it doesn't work, it simply displays a hyphen (rather
than the number of appearances in the text of the search terms), and when
clicked on, there is no drop down menu.

Does anyone know why this is? I thought it might be because the files
where too large. Some of the files are rather big—between 100 and 200
MB—but then it does work with some large files (even some larger than 400
MB), so it can't be the file size. I thought it could have something to do
with the number of appearances of a term, but that doesn't seem to make
sense, because the secondary search works with some files in which the
search term appears hundreds of times. Could it be that the index is too
large? It's currently 7.5 GB. But then this doesn't explain why the
secondary search works with some files and not with others. I updated the
entire index, so that can't be the problem. Almost all the files I'm
searching are in Japanese, but that shouldn't be in issue, as secondary
search works perfectly with many of these Japanese files. (And I should
mention that most of these files were created in the US, so it shouldn't be
an issue of encoding or, in the case of scans, the OCR method....though
perhaps the OCR method could be a factor).

I would appreciate any help on this matter that you might be able to offer.
And in case it's of use, here is a link
for an
example of a file that can be indexed but on which Foxtrot will not perform
a secondary search. (The file was too large to attach.)

Luke Thompson

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Re: Secondary Search not working! [message #407 is a reply to message #406] Wed, 27 July 2016 17:56 Go to previous messageGo to next message
CTM Development
Messages: 57
Registered: April 2014
Member
Sir,

Due to mid-summer holiday recess, it will be a couple of days before we can address your concern and will do so before the end of this week via private mail rather than on the discussion list.

Kind regards,

jean michel/ctm qa

> On Jul 27, 2016, at 10:44 AM, Luke Thompson wrote:
>
> Currently using Foxtrot Professional, v. 5.5.5 build 1423 on a Mac (OS X El Capitan v. 10.11.6). I am having a problem that I also encountered with Foxtrot Personal Search, and that is that the secondary search (the drop-down menu that displays the actual lines of text in which the search terms appear, with the search terms highlighted) works for some files but not for others. When it doesn't work, it simply displays a hyphen (rather than the number of appearances in the text of the search terms), and when clicked on, there is no drop down menu.
>
> Does anyone know why this is? I thought it might be because the files where too large. Some of the files are rather big—between 100 and 200 MB—but then it does work with some large files (even some larger than 400 MB), so it can't be the file size. I thought it could have something to do with the number of appearances of a term, but that doesn't seem to make sense, because the secondary search works with some files in which the search term appears hundreds of times. Could it be that the index is too large? It's currently 7.5 GB. But then this doesn't explain why the secondary search works with some files and not with others. I updated the entire index, so that can't be the problem. Almost all the files I'm searching are in Japanese, but that shouldn't be in issue, as secondary search works perfectly with many of these Japanese files. (And I should mention that most of these files were created in the US, so it shouldn't be an issue of encoding or, in the case of scans, the OCR method....though perhaps the OCR method could be a factor).
>
> I would appreciate any help on this matter that you might be able to offer. And in case it's of use, here is a link for an example of a file that can be indexed but on which Foxtrot will not perform a secondary search. (The file was too large to attach.)
>
> Luke Thompson
>
> --
>
> ---
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Re: Secondary Search not working! [message #408 is a reply to message #406] Thu, 28 July 2016 15:37 Go to previous message
FoxTrot Engineering
Messages: 384
Registered: April 2020
Senior Member
Luke Thompson wrote:

> I am having a problem that I also encountered with
> Foxtrot Personal Search, and that is that the secondary search (the
> drop-down menu that displays the actual lines of text in which the search
> terms appear, with the search terms highlighted) works for some files but
> not for others. When it doesn't work, it simply displays a hyphen (rather
> than the number of appearances in the text of the search terms), and when
> clicked on, there is no drop down menu.

Secondary-level search is very different than the main search, in that that it does not use the FoxTrot index, and it relies on a different mechanism to obtain the textual contents of the file.
FoxTrot uses Spotlight importers to extract the text used to build the index for the main searches.
Secondary-level search operates on the text displayed in the preview (using macOS's PDF, HTML or rich text viewers), and it sometimes differ from the text returned by the Spotlight importer. In this case, secondary-level search may not work at all, or may miss some occurrences of the searched words.
OCR'ed PDF files are a typical example of this, especially because of encoding problems. If you can't select and copy text from a PDF document when you open it using Apple's Preview.app (or if you get garbled text when you do), then secondary-level search won't work as expected in FoxTrot. This is what happens for your sample file.
You can option-click a found document in the search result list, to display it's textual content as it has been indexed, instead of rendering the document. Then secondary-level search should work in this plain text view.


Jérôme - CTM Engineering


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Jérôme - FoxTrot Engineering
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