Copyright: NoteBook Copyright ® 1994 H D Baecker


Contents

Introduction

MDI, the Multi-Document Interface

Functions

Commands

Index


Introduction

The NoteBook Program Copyright © 1994, 1995 by H. D. Baecker

NoteBook is a program designed to store, edit, and retrieve
information from notes made in the course of fieldwork under
various conditions by users in a variety of occupations. The
program was conceived as an aid to persons without any
computer expertise or experience, it is as appropriate for
keeping case notes of social work as it for use
on a portable computer to record field notes at an
archeological dig.  Its uses range from recording an
everyday diary to keeping and using records of professional
consultations and research.

The unit of entry, editing, etc., is a Note, such as this
Introduction. Every Note is dated by the program. The user is
invited to enter a title, of up to 40 characters, for each Note.
The user is then free to enter the text of the Note, which may
be up to some 32,000 characters long. That limit is about 12
standard PC screens. Each Note may also have a user devised or library grahic item, a diagram or picture, stored with it.

Notes are added to Notebooks, which correspond to DOS
files, and which may be searched singly or in groups to locate those Notes that
contain references specified by the user at the time of the
search and need never be known in advance when the Note is
created. A Notebook may hold 16,380 Notes, but that is a
theoretical limit, think of about 1,000 Notes as being the
practical limit.

Indexing and related topics and user instructions are covered
in other Help topics, see Functions and Commands.


MDI
MDI, the Multi-Document Interface

NoteBook allows the use of the Windows Multi-Document Interface to enter, edit, and display Notes.

The number of child windows that may be open at any one time is limited by the amount of working storage and swap space available, as well as by the storage demands of other applications that may be open concurrently. The creation and removal of child windows is governed by the File menu commands New and Close. The user is notified immediately no more space is available. Thereupon the rational response is to close some windows, or another application or to Exit the program.

One NoteBook is normally open in each window. Each window may have a different Notebook open in it, or all windows may use the same Notebook, or there may be any possible mixture of these cases. Where more than one window has the same Notebook open each window may contain the same Note or each may contain a different Note, or, mix and match.

All menu commands that involve a Note or a Notebook are carried out with reference to the topmost window. To bring a window to the top click on any visible part of it with the mouse or select it from the windows listed in the Window menu.
An Add, Edit, or Input operation is not ended when the relevant window no longer has the focus because another has been selected. Operations terminate, and Notes are written out to their Notebook, when the Notes|Save command is chosen for that window, when another command affecting the window is activated or on program exit. In the last case the order of window closure, and so of Notes being saved, is Z-order, that is, top down of the layered windows.

As with any MDI application "copy and paste" is possible between any pairs of windows, or a text may be copied into the Clipboard and then pasted to a succession of other windows.


Functions

Indexing

Unwords

Conflation

Queries

Input from File

Spelling

Sets

Graphics


Indexing

Every Note is indexed by the program when the Note is added or
edited. Every word used in the Note is indexed, unless that word
is an "unword". Unwords are those words of the language that it
makes no sense to use as index terms, like "the" and "and".
Please see Unwords for a detailed explanation.

The remaining words are conflated, that is, they are reduced to
their word-stem, wherever this action is applicable. For instance,
regular plurals in "-s" are reduced to their singular forms, the past
tense of verbs in "-ed" is changed to the present tense, and so
on. One copy of each stem, however many times it occurs in the
text of the Note,  is then stored in an index associated with that
Note. For further discussion please see Conflation.

When a user queries a Notebook the index of each of its Notes is
examined to seek a match for the query term, and the Notes
satisfying the specified criteria are marked. These may be
individually displayed for inspection by using the Notes|Show
command. The procedure is explained in detail under Queries.


Unwords

In any language there are a large number of words that do not qualify as index terms for information
retrieval purposes because they are used so frequently that they can be found in just about any text
of the language. There are the immediately obvious words such as "the" and "and" , but there are
quite a few more, such as "but" and "about" and "this" and "such" itself, etc. There is as yet no
generally accepted name for these words, so we call them Unwords.

The NoteBook program comes with a distribution file of about 200 of these unwords. This file is
loaded every time the program is executed. When the user completes the addition of a Note by
saving it (using the command Notes|Save, or by  selecting another action) then the Note is indexed,
but first the unwords in the Note are eliminated from consideration for indexing (but they remain
present in the stored text as entered). The remaining words are then conflated  and a single copy of
each root or word-stem is stored in the index for that Note. When a Notebook is queried the search
is of each Note's index to locate and mark those Notes that meet the criteria.

Users are free to edit the file of unwords, UNWORDS.DTA, using an ASCII-only text editor such as
MS-Windows Notepad or MS-DOS Edit. Often a user may wish to add words, usually dialect or
slang, that are locally insignificant, equally as often a user may wish to delete a certain word so that
it is not considered by the program to be an unword. For instance, the distribution file contains "so"
as an unword. But a social worker with a client base of a large number of ethnic Chinese may have to
deleted "so" as an unword because "So" may be a widespread family name and thus essential as an
index term.

The distribution file is in alphabetical order, this is only for convenience for editing and is not strictly
necessary, neither is it necessary that entries be only in upper case. But there is a requirement that
entries contain no punctuation, that is, the correct unword rendering of "don't" is "dont" or "DONT" in
the file. There is no restriction on the length of unwords, nor is there a strict limit to their number. The
file of unwords in current use must always have the filename UNWORDS.DTA and must always
be in the same subdirectory as the NOTEBOOK.EXE file.

Increasing the number of unwords increases the time it takes to determine for each word in a Note
whether it is an unword or not, but decreases the number of words to be conflated and indexed
subsequently, and so decreases the time to search an index during retrieval. Increasing the number
of unwords stored in the program also subtracts from the space available for other purposes during
program use. You choose.


Conflation

Conflation is the process, in linguistics, of reducing a word to its stem or root, often referred to as
"stemming". This process can be carried out for agglutinative languages, such as English, much more
so Finnish, that accrete tense or case designations to word roots. Analytic languages, such as those of
South-East Asia, express shades of meaning by using strings of separate words.

Conflation would work perfectly if we used a language that admitted no irregular words or any
exceptions. But in English those who have more than one child have children, not childs, and if we go to
the park today we went there yesterday perhaps, or might have gone. What we did not do is goed there.

Reality is. So conflation is an imperfect tool that works for the regular nouns and verbs of English, the
majority, and does not work for the irregular ones.

Most queries will be based on nouns or noun and adjective combinations. It may seem that the way
verbs are handled does not matter much. This is true to some extent, but, particularly in English, it is
not possible by simple mechanical text analysis to establish whether a word is or is not a verb. The
program might as well attempt to handle verbs efficiently too to conserve space and time, mixed in with
the rest.

But in framing queries the user is advised to take account of irregular verbs and nouns, and of the
misleading trail they might leave in the index.


Queries

Searches of the current Notebook are activated using the
Queries|Query menu command, which brings up the queries
dialog.

Query terms entered across a line of the dialog are used in
conjunction for the search, that is, if you enter "bright
objects"  on the same line of the dialog in consecutive entry
fields (no gaps allowed) then for a Note to be retrieved it must
contain both words, but these words do not need to occur
together in the Note text or title. Thus "bright objects" will find
the occurrence of both or either of the sequences "bright
objects" and "objects that are pink and bright" in a Note, or
any Note that contains both words at least once each
anywhere in the Note. Or, of course, allowing for conflation,
the words "object" or "objected" and "bright".

Query terms or groups of terms on separate lines of the query
dialog form independent queries. Up to 5 query lines at a time
may be entered, each of up to 4 terms. Each term must be a
single word, no embedded spaces allowed, so that if you are
looking for "John Hancock" you must enter "John" and
"Hancock" separately on the same line. If you need to find
references to both "John Hancock" and"Edwin Smith",
together in the same Note, enter all 4 words on a line.
However, if you want to find references to either of them, enter
"John" and "Hancock" on one line and "Edwin" and "Smith"
on another.

To find Notes referring to both "John Hancock" and "John
Jones" you need only enter the three terms "John",
"Hancock" and "Jones" on a line.

Always enter terms from the left margin on a line, and from
the top down, leaving no gaps, so that unused entry fields are
at bottom right of the dialog.

The start and end dates for the search must be entered as
numbers only (e.g. March is "3") in the order year (all 4 digits,
life is confusing otherwise around the turn of the millenium),
month, day.

Before the search each query terms is conflated, but the
program does not check for unwords in queries.

After a Query the list of "hits" is displayed and any Note on it
can be selected for display. Later use Notes|Show to display
other Notes found by the search. Found Notes are so
displayed until cancelled by using Query|Cancel. Subsequent
Note lists will again be of Active Notes.


Input from File

The menu commands File|Compact (if deleted Notes are archived) and Notes|SaveAs output Notes in a form that may be re-entered using Notes|Input. Such Notes may also be generated offline using a text editor such as MS-DOS Edit or MS_Windows Notepad, that is, one that inserts no formatting characters other than the ones the user types at the keyboard.

The format for a Note to be input from a file is as follows:

A title line comprising a date in the form YYYY mmm DD as used throughout this program, followed by a space which is in turn followed by a title string of up to 40 characters. No included newlines, tabs, etc. are allowed. The line ends with a newline.

Follow this with text of up to 32,760 characters, the body of the Note.

Occassionally it may be necessary or convenient to generate Notes using a text editor such as MS-Windows Notepad or MS-DOS Edit. If so the first line must be the date/title as described above. The rest of the text is the body of the Note. The text ends with a newline, carriage return/linefeed, produced by pressing Enter or Return.

Your text editor may require you to use the Enter (or Return) key to include newline characters (carriage return/new line  pairs) at appropriate places. This does no harm but reduces the efficiency of your Notes' storage and retrieval as compared to use of Wordwrap, as in MS-Windows Notepad.

If you are going to record multiple Notes in one file or a single Note in a file then the text body of each Note must be followed by a single line exactly as follows:

37373737

If the input file holds only a single Note the simple sequence Notes|Input, Notes|Save, will Add the Note to the current Notebook, with the current date if produced with a text editor, and the original date if an archived Note..

If an input file holds more than one Note then Notes|Input will read the whole file into the window. The user must then edit the text with the Edit menu commands, using the Clipboard as temporary storage, to bring each Note into the window separately for Notes|Save to store it.

If the input file holds more than one Note and also exceeds 32,760 bytes in length the split can be performed using the enclosed SPLITTER.EXE program. If the input to SPLITTER is SOMENAME.TXT holding 9 Notes then the output of SPLITTER will be 9 files named SOMENAME.001, SOMENAME.002...SOMENAME.009.

Multiple Notes in an archived file are also separated by nonsense lines easy to recognize and eliminate: 37373737, as above.

No Note may exceed 32760 characters in length.


Spelling

There is English spelling. There is American spelling. There is no doubt other spelling. And then there is spelling. In some way or other any information retrieval facility using text depends on spelling.

The NoteBook program only depends on "correct" spelling to eliminate unwords from indexing, and on the spelling of word endings to implement conflation.

Insofar as possible the conflation process caters to both English and American conventions, but if the English conventions fail then please revert to American usage.

However, the program is utterly dependent  on CONSISTENT spelling by the user in order to make effective retrieval possible.

The program will "work" after a fashion  for any language that standard Windows can handle as input. The ability to eliminate unwords is not essential to the operation of the program and can be enhanced by generating a foreign UNWORDS.DTA file. The English conflation rules (not amenable to user editing) are not essential either but may generate some strange results in some languages. In particular, languages that have accented characters or rely upon punctuation marks to augment spelling may store some bizarre text and might generate some even more bizarre index entries


Sets

In the course of social work and similar activities it may be convenient to keep a Notebook for each member of a client family, but also to have some means of interrogating the records of all family members regarding some matter. To facilitate this Notebooks may be grouped into Sets which are searched by a single query command.

The commands of the Sets menu allow Sets of Notebooks to be formed, viewed, selected for use, and destroyed. Since Sets will normally have but a few members the way to edit the composition of a Set is to undo the old and build a new Set.

It is a deliberate limitation that once selected a Set is only active for the next query following that selection. No hidden surprises from lurking selections.


Graphics

Each Note may have a graphic object associated with it. Graphic objects are generated, edited and viewd using the Paintbrush program distributed with MS-Windows 3.1. Library graphic objects may be used if they are first imported into Paintbrush.

Anything that can be created in Paintbrush can be stored as part of a Note. Users are warned that the use of color rather than monochrome stored images is very expensive of disk storage. Large images are also larger consumers of storage in a ratio that may not be immediately apparent to the naked eye.

If you wish to print a graphic object or part thereof then Paintbrush affords the necessary facilities.


Commands

File Menu

Notes Menu

Queries Menu

Edit Menu

Sets Menu

Graphics Menu


File Menu

New

Opens a new child window and presents a file dialog for the user to select the Notebook to open in that child window. See below under "Open" for details of creating new Notebooks.

Open

Opens or creates a Notebook. As Notebooks are embodied as
MS-DOS files Notebook names follow the limitations of DOS
filenames, but are entered without extensions. Immediately
after creating a new Notebook the first use of it must be to
add at least one Note to it. To create a new Notebook change to the subdirectory in which you wish to create the new Notebook and type the name into the input field or edit area, as it is often called, of the file dialog, without extension.
In any event any previously open Notebook is closed first.

Current?

Displays the directory path and filename of the currently open Notebook.

MakeDir

Makes a new subdirectory and then changes to it as the
Current Directory. See your Windows documentation on how to determine the place in the directory tree at which a new subdirectory will be created, relative to the Current Directory.

Compact

Eliminates the gaps caused by editing Notes and physically
removes previously hidden Notes from the current Notebook,
returning a compacted Notebook file. If the user does not
name an archive file then no Notes are deleted and hidden
Notes are instead returned to view., and only gaps resulting
from editing are recovered.
Every time a Notebook is opened it is automatically compacted (with no interference with Hidden Notebooks), if editing has given rise to more than 20% waste space in the Notebook.

Close

Closes the Notebook in the selected child window and also closes that window, unless it is the only open window remaining.

Exit

Exits from the program, first storing any Notes in the
course of being Added or Edited, and closing the open
Notebooks and windows. Note that every Add or Edit, or Input, causes
the Index on disk to be updated immediately on completion.


Notes Menu

Add

Displays an input dialog for the user to enter a title of up to 40
characters. The program will continue to cycle until a title has
been entered, because in the absence of a title Notes made the same day would be indistinguishable from each other.  Then it enables entry of the body of the Note.
A Note may comprise up to 32,760 characters, including
spaces and all other punctuation. The Enter key causes two
characters to be entered, but users are advised to use it only
at the end of paragraphs and to rely on the wordwrap feature,
always enabled, otherwise the text will not accommodate to
different window sizes. Entry of the Note is terminated by
choosing Notes|Save or by choosing another activity (this new activity may be another Add).

Show

Displays a list of the Notes in the current Notebook. Select a
Note to view by clicking on it and OK, or double-clicking on
the Note. After viewing the displayed Note click on Edit|Clear
or start another action to clear the screen of it. The Note list
displayed is normally of all the active Notes. But after a query,
until Query|Cancel has been selected, the display is of those
Notes that satisfied the most recent query. When
Notes|Restore is selected then the display is the list of
Hidden Notes.

Edit

Choose the Note to edit from the list. After editing use
Notes|Save, or start another activity, to store the edited Note,
or choose Edit|Clear to retain the original unedited version of
the Note. Whatever the changes you appear to make to the date or title on the
screen you cannot change the original stored date or title.

Save

Indexes and saves the current Note to the open Notebook if used immediately
after an Add, Edit, or Input action, and then clears the screen. Otherwise it only clears the screen.

Hide

Hides the selected Note. A hidden Note is not listed except to
Restore it, does not get searched during a query, and
becomes a candidate for archiving and deletion when the
Notebook is Compacted.

Restore

Select and Restore a Hidden Note to view. The Restored Note
again becomes a candidate for queries.

Input

Reads a Note from an external file specified by the user.
Notes read are assumed to have the input format explained
under Input from File.

Print

Prints the currently displayed Note on the default printer.
There is an attempt at pagination but no other layout
niceness. To format the text for prettyprint either SaveAs the
Note to a file, or CopyAll to the Clipboard, and then massage
it with a text editor or word processor of choice.

SaveAs

Outputs the Note as ASCII text to the chosen file. If the file
already exists the Note is appended, otherwise a new file is
created.


Queries Menu

Query

Initiates a search of the current Notebook as explained under
Queries.

Cancel

Cancels the results of the most recent search so that "hits" are
"forgotten". It is not necessary to Cancel before initiating another
search with Queries|Query but until a search result is cancelled
ordinary display and editing of Notes is prevented as all Active Notes
are not shown in the Notes list, and edited Notes will not be stored again.


Edit Menu

Cut

Copies the selected text to the Clipboard and cuts, clears, that text
from the screen and from the text stored.

Copy

Copies the selected text from the screen to the Clipboard.

Paste

Copies the contents of the Clipboard to the screen at the cursor.

Clear

Clears the screen and terminates processing of the current Note.

CopyAll

Copies all of the current Note to the Clipboard.


Sets Menu

New

The user is asked to name a new Set, and is then presented with a File Dialog repeatedly to choose Notebooks to become members of that set, until s/he Cancels the file dialog.

Select

The user is asked to select a Set for use during the next immediate Query operation. The selection remains in effect for that next Query only.

View

The user is asked to choose a Set to view.

Undo

Asks the user to select a Set for destruction.


Graphics Menu

New

Opens the Paintbrush program for the user to create a new graphic object. When the object is complete store it as a new file, Save As, from Paintbrush. On return to Notebook you will be asked to confirm the filename of the graphic. If a graphic object is already associated with the current Note you will be given the choice of replacing it or not. (Be careful about replacement if there is a danger that you will destroy a library file!)

Graphic objects may also be imported into Paintbrush from a library. If you are certain to retain the file of that object online there is no need to duplicate it, you need only pass the file reference back to NoteBook to form the association with the current Note.

View/Edit

 Selects the graphic file associated with the current Note to View and/or Edit in Paintbrush. To save the result of Editing, Save the object in Paintbrush.

Erase

 Erases the graphic associated with the current Note.This could be a fertile field for trouble if you have linked to a library file of a graphic directly!


Index

C

Commands

Conflation

Contents

E

Edit Menu

F

File Menu

Functions

G

Graphics Menu

Graphics

I

Index

Indexing

Input from File

Introduction

M

MDI

Menus

N

Notes Menu

Q

Queries Menu

Queries

S

Sets Menu

Sets

Spelling

Support

T

To Register

U

Unwords


Menus

Individual menu options and effects are described in detail under Commands.


Support


To Register


Commands

<Commands>


Conflation

<Conflation>


Functions

<Functions>


Indexing

<Indexing>


Input from File

<Input from File>


Queries

<Queries>


Unwords

<Unwords>