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From: science@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Mark Zimmermann)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Texas Indexing/Browsing Stack.
Message-ID: <4652@oasys.dt.navy.mil>
Date: 4 Dec 90 17:16:02 GMT
References: <2094@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au>
Organization: David Taylor Research Center
Lines: 61

Tnx for query, Phill, re TEXAS, etc. information retrieval stacks!
(and tnx, Jeanne, for responding for me; I don't usually read this
newsgroup, alas).  To give a bit more history and background:
  - TEXAS version 0.27 is the last of that original line of
     development;
  - For a while, I experimented with a "shareware" version, TEX, which
     ultimately reached version 0.51 ... about 120 folks were kind
     enough to write me and "register"
  - With the kind support of Apple's Library (and others), in early
     1990 I finished a major revision and released it, under the name
     "Free Text"; it's completely free software, under terms of the
     GNU General Public License, and comes with full source code, etc.

The current version of Free Text is 1.02; all versions from 1.0 on up
are usable, but I have made some improvements in the handling of
indexed non-TEXT files, corrected typos in the documentation, etc.,
and would recommend you look for v.1.02 if possible.  It is on file in
the INFO-MAC archives at sumex-aim.stanford.edu on the Internet, in
the MACHYPER forum library on CompuServe, and probably elsewhere as
well.  If you can't find it on the nets, you can get it from me at
P.O.Box 598, Kensington, MD  20895-0598, USA, for $25 US (sorry to ask
for so much, but I want to discourage requests) ... or get it from a
friend, as you are free to do, give it away to all you know, etc.

Free Text is greatly improved over its predecessors in many ways.  The
user interface is better (I think), it supports full Boolean fuzzy
proximity searching, it can browse (on separate cards) many indexed
databases at once, and the help/documentation is much more complete
(and includes a cute "Guided Tour").  I'm working on several updates,
to ultimately include true multifile-database-browsing, full user
control of alphabetization and character mapping, and other features
that folks have asked for ... along with changes to take advantage of
HC2.0 new features ... but be warned, I have very little time to
devote to this (at home, my twins are now 5 years old, we have an
8-year-old who is being homeschooled, and I have to work on other
stuff to make a living at the office!) --- so please forgive me if I
don't have a new release ready until next year some time....

For those who haven't heard of Free Text (or TEX, or TEXAS, or
qndxr.c/brwsr.c), these are tools to let individuals work with big
(many megabytes) files of free-text data ... I call Free Text my
"real-time high-bandwidth free-text information-retrieval toolkit".
The focus is on fast, easy, powerful retrieval of data from
unorganized collections of words.  As Phill mentioned in his note,
Free Text and the like are very applicable to USENET news; other
people use it to index and browse the Bible, linguistic corpora,
collections of online correspondence, tech manuals, etc.

Free Text is implemented as a HyperCard stack (on the Mac) which
serves as an interface to the C routines (XFCNs) that do the actual
building of inverted-index data structures and retrieval from those
data structures.  There is also a command-line version of the system
that runs on UNIX or VMS or MS-DOS iron, though it's pretty ugly to
use, IMHO.  Very recently, I've been working with some GNU Emacs
wizards, and one of them has done a *very* nice interface between the
generic UNIX browser and GNU Emacs (in about 1400 lines of Elisp
code), which I personally recommend using if you are into such things.

Anyway, sorry to go on at such length ... tnx, Phill & Jeanne, for
kind comments re my programs --- I'm glad you're enjoying them!  ^z
(science@oasys.dt.navy.mil)