How to use TEXTPACK

A short description of TEXTPACK

TEXTPACK always needs two system files: a SENTENCE and a SPLIT file. If you have these files already prepared (like in the demo), you can start immediately to explore your texts.

Opening the TEXTPACK files

As a first step the SENTENCE and the SPLIT file must be opened. To open a SENTENCE or SPLIT file select in the menu "File", "Open TEXTPACK files", "Open SENTENCE file" or "Open SPLIT file".

Once opened a SENTENCE or SPLIT file is available for all further analysis until a new file has been opened or created. When you start TEXTPACK the next time the names of the SENTENCE and SPLIT files are stored and you may not open these files. The names of the opened SENTENCE and SPLIT file are shown in the status line of TEXTPACK.

Running TEXTPACK

In the menu of TEXTPACK you will find the different functions described further on in the manual. The functions are grouped in four parts: file menu, text exploration, text coding, and filtering. Some special features are available in the File menu: preparing the SENTENCE and SPLIT file, exporting the text file, and displaying the text. After selecting one of the functions TEXTPACK shows you a function specific window to ask for more options. You can specify all the options you need and after clicking the OK button TEXTPACK starts working. After finishing the process, TEXTPACK shows the result in an output window. This window has its own menu. You can save the output, print it or edit it. You may specify some options to handle this output in the "Preferences" menu.

Important: You must always close this output window before you can select the next topic of the TEXTPACK menu.

GO/STOP Words and Dictionaries

Go/STOP words and dictionaries must always be stored in a file. TEXTPACK offers a simple editor to create and edit such a GO/STOP word list or a dictionary ("File", "Create/Edit GO/STOP words"). The file must be created before you can use any function intended to access the GO/STOP words or dictionary. If you want to use an existing file, it can be open in the "File", "Open TEXTPACK files" menu. If you want to use e.g. GO/STOP words in a function and you have not opened a file until that point, the function will ask you for a file. Once opened, the dictionary or GO/STOP word file is used for all subsequent functions if such a file is necessary. If a dictionary or a GO/STOP word file has been opened, the name is shown in the status line.

Filtering

The menu "Selection" in TEXTPACK allows you two different options to select text units: to specify a filter on the basis of the identification or to use a numeric file to select text units. In the second case a new SENTENCE file which includes all selected texts will be stored for further use. If you specify a filter to select specific IDs, it will be used in all subsequent procedures until you set a new filter or you include all texts again (same menu). The status line signals whether a filter is used or not (No ID filter/ID filter).

Preferences

TEXTPACK allows you to configure your personal environment. All these options will be stored for later calls of TEXTPACK. You may specify folders for your scratch and data files and some output specifications:

Folder for all TEXTPACK files
You may specify a data directory from where your TEXTPACK files will be read and in which new files will be stored. If you specify no folder, the files will be stored in the TEXTPACK folder.

Folder for scratch files
Additionally, you can specify a folder where TEXTPACK will store all scratch files (e.g. c:\temp). This folder name may not contain any blanks!

Overwrite listing, Append listing
Each function in TEXTPACK produces an output listing which is shown in the output window. After closing this window, the output is deleted. If you want to store the output of all procedures instead of overwriting it, you may select the option "append" instead of "replace".

Replace blanks through tabs
The printed output of TEXTPACK is formatted by blanks. If you save the output in a file for later use in a word processing system, the font must be courier in that system to have the right text format. If you plan to use it in a word processor system with a font other than Courier you can specify that blanks in the output tables should be replaced by tabs.

Language
The SPLIT files in TEXTPACK must be sorted alphabetically. You can produce, for example, a frequency list sorted alphabetically according to the words. In both cases, "alphabetically sorted" means different sorting for different languages, e.g. English, German, or others. TEXTPACK allows you to specify the language which will be used. Per default, the "English" (ANSI) sort order will be used, which is suitable for most languages. You can select GERMAN if you use German texts with umlaut characters. If you want to use other languages, or if the sort order causes problems, please feel free to contact the developer of TEXTPACK in order to have a special dictionary prepared for your sorting needs.