XTRACT Version 4.1 Overview =========================== 1. What's NEW in XTRACT v4.1 a. An inline viewer option b. NEW to search the 1% US-Sample c. Extra search options implemented. d. On-screen help is now available. 2. XTRACT v3.3 - Bug Fixes 3. What's NEW in XTRACT v3.2 4. Changes from XTRACT v2.2 5. What two of our customers say about XTRACT! What's NEW in XTRACT v4.1 ========================= a. The most significant addition for UK users may be the inline viewer option. This means that you can configure XTRACT to give you the option, at the end of your search, to invoke any text BROWSE, or LIST utility to examine the results of your search. You can choose any utility you wish, provided you can call it up with a single file name as operand from the DOS prompt - as, for example, you might have typed:- LIST WHATSNEW.TXT at the DOS prompt to read this file. To activate this option, follow the instructions in the XTRACT.INI file, using the Viewer keyword to specify your choice of utility, for example:- Viewer=LIST.COM b. A 1% sample of the US 1880 census has become available to us as a result of a study undertaken within the history department at the University of Minnesota. Version 4 of XTRACT has been released specifically to search and format this data, as an alternative to, or as well as the UK 1851 2% sample. For a fuller description of the US data, please see the file US8_DESC.ZIP, which complements the equivalent for the UK 2% sample, UKC_DESC.ARJ. This file should be available wherever you found your copy of XTRACT4x.ARJ [where 4x is the most recent version number]. Note that in order to cater for additional information on US census, this version supports the following new keywords, with values which may be adjusted in XTRACT's configuration file:- ShortBPL - by default, XTRACT displays birthplaces in short form, using ICPSR, or ISO abbreviations. Specifying ShortBPL=No allows display in full. ShortOCC - by default, the unregistered version of XTRACT displays occupations in general form at all times. The registered version displays detailed occupational information, but it can be forced into general form by using ShortOCC=Yes. ShortREL - by default, the unregistered version of XTRACT displays relationships to heads of households in a very general form at all times. The registered version displays more detailed relationship information, but it can be forced into the more compact general form by using ShortREL=Yes. ShortSick - by default, XTRACT displays information (when it is present) as to whether an individual is disabled, in terms of being blind, deaf, crippled, &c. The US census form also contains a category for recording sickness on the day of the ennumeration, which may be independent of the former. Specifying ShortSick=No forces a display of sickness on day of ennumeration, rather than in more general terms. c. The option to search on ALL fields in a census record, apart from ages has now been fully implemented. So in particular, you can now search for matches of Relationship, and Marital Status; and Disabilities, or Country of Origin, as well as previously, Forenames, Occupation, &c. Note also support has now been added for the Maxdrive keyword, which was documented for version 3.x, but disabled. d. On-screen help is now available - the brief "Usage" screen which was displayed if the wrong parameters were supplied has been expanded, and help text is immediately available on typing:- XTRACT -h or XTRACT -? as well as if the command line parameter syntax is incorrect. XTRACT v3.3 - Bug Fixes ======================= XTRACT v3.3 is essentially a bug fix release. A list of new features arriving with XTRACT v3.2 follows this section. The following is a list of bugs which have been fixed:- 1) Fixed a bug present since version 2.2. If searching for a valid three letter surname in a single county, say:- XTRACT DBY LEE it would fail to recognise DBY, and proceed merrily to search the surname index, and pull out all LEE. 2) Fixed another bug which was also in version 2.2. It couldn't find the archiver if it was in the startup directory (reported ARJ failed with an errorlevel of -1). 3) The maximum number of working drives has been adjusted to reflect the current working drive. This will hopefully cater for systems with more than 4 fixed logical drives. 4) If requesting .CSV output, the parish name was omitted when switching parishes. 5) The IBMChars keyword was being ignored if set to "NO". What's NEW in XTRACT v3.2 ========================= 1) The ORDER, and displayed WIDTH for fields (surname, forename, &c) in the output files are now configurable. See the FieldSize keyword in XTRACT.INI for details. 2) You can now search on fields other than surname, and combine your targets logically, eg:- XTRACT S(SMITH) & F(JOHN) [Search for Surname (SMITH) and Forename(John)] 3) At the other extreme, it's now possible to disable all searching, so that, for instance, you can select a whole county to view. 4) Or you can specify "wild-card" selection. This is not a true wild-card to "match anything", but rather to select any entries which otherwise would be discarded by the normal matching process - for instance blank surnames, or surname "N K". 5) It is now possible for XTRACT to read the census data in a variety of archived formats, for instance .ZIP files. You can also specify the input file mask to use, to override the default UKC_ccc.ARJ. NB: XTRACT will NOT read file formats other than the original 2% standard ASCII text files. 6) For those with a lorra lorra disk space, the new XTRACT can read the *.T* files directly. 7) You can limit the year you search by specifying a "mask" parameter for selecting from the *.T* files. See the TxtFileMask keyword, in XTRACT.INI for details. 8) Input and output directories are configurable. See the file XTRACT.INI, and the XTRACT Reference Manual for how. 9) You can add archives containing your own data to the UKC_ccc.ARJ series to be searched. Typically these would be "one name" collections. Naturally, you do need to ensure you create the same format and file structure as the 2%, original, but thereafter, all you need to do is choose a unique trigraph to replace the 'ccc', and to enter this, and a description of contents, in your XTRACT.INI file. 10) It's now possible to define a "scratch" directory to unpack the census data to. This may be particularly useful for users who need to keep their data files on floppy disk, as their scratch directory can be on their hard disk, or - for instance - a RAM drive. You will still need sufficient free space to unpack the data, however. 11) You may now select comma delimited (.CSV) output (suitable for importing into a database or spreadsheet). XTRACT will report maximum field widths identified at the end of your search to assist you in setting up a fixed length record database. 12) You get "cookies" in the registered version, and two additional utilities - XTPRINT for paginating output, and XCHART for producing a soundex chart of surnames matching the one you supply. 13) XTRACT now displays a progress bar for each file searched, and both lists and logs the name of the parish being searched. 14) There is limited support for changing screen colors. 15) Other options are configurable - check out the XTRACT Reference Manual. CHANGES from XTRACT v2.2 ======================== 1) XTRACT v3.2 will by default OVERWRITE existing files of the same name on a fresh search. Version 2.2 APPENDED to existing files, which you can still do in Version 3.2, using the OutputMode configuration option in XTRACT.INI, XTRACT's configuration file, and in fact, this is how it is set up in the distribution package. 2) Results by default will be saved in the startup directory, rather than the directory containing the UKC_ccc.ARJ files. You can re-configure this using the RESULTS keyword in XTRACT.INI. 3) If you specify a search for more than one Surname, results are written to one file only, rather than separate files. However, you *can* force separate files, by separating the surnames with a Caret symbol (^). See the XTRACT Reference Manual for more details. 4) Output in the same format as the original (using the '-' switch on the command line) will be written to a file with extension .TXT, rather than using the same extension as a standard search. This is to enable you to retain the results of a previous search more easily. 5) XTRACT v2.2 allowed a width of only two columns for printing Ages of Males. This has been amended for v3.2 to default to 3 characters, as it does for Ages of Females. Note that if you are using the default FieldSize settings, and comparing the results from a search using an earlier version of XTRACT, the effect of this "bug fix" is that your search results file will be larger, almost certainly, than the earlier one. 6) The original v2.2 SOUNDX utility is no longer distributed with XTRACT. In fact this has been revamped, to become two separate utilities XCHART (to produce a printed chart of soundex matches) and XTSNDX (which is still under development, and will allow selection, and therefore filtering of the soundex matches identified. What two of our customers have said about XTRACT ================================================ "I find it to be very effective and fast and overall a nice improvement over v.2.2. I particularly like the new progress bars..." TW, Hampshire. "I had a number of the UKCxxx.ARJ files but the bother of having these expanded files cluttering up my disks, the problem of reading them and sorting out the wheat from the chaff was a pain. XTRACT removed that pain." RD, Norfolk. -+- Rosemary Lockie, 2:253/188 September 1995