Free Text Search

There are two different ways to search the ANSA Document collection.

• Via a custom Windows application
• Via Adobe Acrobat (not Acrobat Reader)

It is also possible to index the collection using a third party indexer (for example as part of a web server).

Using the Custom Windows Application

The ANSA document collection is supplied with a simple custom application for viewing and searching documents. This may be installed by double-clicking on setup.exe in the top level CD directory. This provides a web-browser like interface, a document tree and a free text search facility. The search facility works by greping through text only versions of the documents and then tabulating the output. This is a relatively slow and simplistic search mechanism.

Using Adobe Acrobat

If you have a full version of Adobe Acrobat version 3.0 or above, then this can be used to perform complex free text searches over the collection. An index file has been created, and the following instructions describe how to configure Acrobat to use this when performing searches.

1. Start Acrobat
2. Select the 'Select Indexes' menu.
   For Acrobat 4.0 this is Edit->Search->Select Indexes.
   For Acrobat Exchange 3.0 this is Tools->Search->Indexes
3. Select Add, locate the Index.pdx file in the AnsaTech directory on the CD-ROM, click on Open
4. Ensure that the 'ANSA Document Collection' index is ticked. Untick other indexes
5. To search, select Edit->Search->Query / Tools->Search->Query
6. See the Acrobat documentation for more details

Indexing the Collection via a Web Server

If the ANSA Document collection is mounted as part of a Web Site, it may be useful to add the ANSA documents to that site's search engine (if it has one). The details of this will be web server specific, but the following information may be useful:

• There is a text only version of every .pdf file. These are in the ANSATech/Text directory
• The file ANSATech/ANSATech.txt provides linking information for each of these files - i.e. which .pdf file corresponds to each .txt file, and what the Title, Author and Date of the document are.
• This information is currently used by the Custom Windows App to tabulate results from grep searches.