Does it run on Windows 7?

Yes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to install on a network

Install ONE copy only, on whichever PC is used for networked programs. That is, when running setup.exe choose your network server eg. n:\wsmith5.
Run n:\wsmith5\wordsmith.exe.
Paste in the registration code as you would with a stand-alone version.
Don't forget to check the "For use of network?" box.
Press OK.

You will see a message telling you the code is OK (if it is!) and can choose OK or Help -- click Help before you press OK. If you miss it, open the main help and look in the installation section under "network defaults". The rest is explained there. You can click here to see the Online version.

Is there an important difference between a key word with a keyness of 50 and another of 500?

Suppose you process a text about a farmer growing 3 crops (wheat, oats and chick-peas) and suffering from 3 problems (rain, wind, drought). If each of these crops is equally important in the text, and each of the 3 problems takes one paragraph each to explain, the human reader may decide that all three crops are equally key and all three problems equally key. But in English these three crop-terms and weather-terms vary enormously in frequency (chick-peas and drought least frequent). WordSmith's KW analysis will necessarily give a higher keyness value to the rarer words. So it is generally unsafe to rely on the order of KWs in a KW list.

How to process IPA phonetic symbols?

You will need to solve two quite separate problems.
First, you need a suitable font in your computer to be able to see the symbols on the screen and print them. To do that, download a suitable font e.g. from SIL (CharisSIL) and ensure you copy all the .ttf files within it (CharisSILR.ttf, CharisSILB.ttf etc) to c:\windows\fonts.
Second, you need WordSmith to be able to process the symbols in your text files. The easiest way to do that is to ensure your texts are in Unicode (in MS Word, save as plain text (.txt) and in the set of encodings choose "Unicode"). Here's a zipped sample for you to use for test purposes.
You should now be able to open the unzipped sample text in Notepad, select your font and see everything OK. It should look something like this

  

 

 

 

 

Now re-start WordSmith so as to be sure all the fonts are loaded and choose the font in Adjust Settings | Languages :

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Characters window you should now be able to see the results. There are charts at Unicode e.g. here showing the IPA symbols.
With this you should now be able to generate a concordance:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a wordlist use : as an acceptable mid-word character and set the case to lower-case

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

compatibility of files saved with different versions

As WordSmith develops, sometimes extra features need to be saved along with a word-list, a concordance etc. which were not saved in earlier versions. I try hard to ensure backward compatibility (e.g. that version 4 data can stiill be read OK using version 5) but not forward compatibility. So reading version 5 data using a version 4 copy of WordSmith may not work. Best solution -- keep up-to-date.

language choosing problems

Some users with OS from the Far East have reported problems choosing the language. If the Languages Chooser doesn't work or crashes, feel free to edit the plain text file language_choices.ini which you will find in the folder where your settings are stored (Documents\wsmith5). Edit the file using Notepad or similar, not Word. The file contains a number of references to languages. Try adding these and then saving.

[Chinese]
language name=Chinese
sort as in=2052
preference=alternative language
hyphen breaks word=NO
Windows codepage=936
Dos codepage=936
font name=Microsoft Sans Serif
font character set=136
font size=10
extra ANSI symbols within a word=
allow extra symbols at start of word=NO
allow extra symbols at end of word=NO
ANSI lower case accents=
ANSI upper case accents=

[Korean]
language name=Korean
sort as in=1042
preference=alternative language
hyphen breaks word=NO
Windows codepage=949
Dos codepage=949
font name=
font character set=130
font size=10
extra ANSI symbols within a word=
allow extra symbols at start of word=NO
allow extra symbols at end of word=NO
ANSI lower case accents=
ANSI upper case accents=

Actually all the languages chooser does is create / edit this plain text file.

After editing you will need to re-start WordSmith 5, and it will read the new version of your language_choices.ini file.

Alternatively you may wish to revert to a previous version of WS5.