File Types

The default file specification is *.* (i.e. any file) but this can be altered in the box or set permanently in wordsmith8.ini.

Select All

Selects all the files in the current folder.

Drives and Folders

Double-click on a folder to enter it. You can re-visit a folder if its name is in the folder window history list, and easily go back with the standard Windows "back" button. Or click on the button to choose a new drive or folder.

Sub-Folders

If checked, when you select a whole driveful or a whole folderful of texts at the left, you will select it plus any files in any sub-folders of that drive or folder.

Sorting

By clicking on the column headers (Folder, Filename, Size, Type, Words, Unicode, Date etc.) you can re-sort the listing.

Test text format (Unicode test)

This button checks the format of any files selected. In the screenshot above, no tests have been done so the display shows ? for each file. If you get inconsistency as in this case with a set of Polish texts, you'll be invited to convert them all to Unicode.

Any ANSI texts such as the last two above will get converted in accordance with the currently selected language.

Favourites

Two buttons on the right () allow you to save or get a previous file selection, saving you the trouble of making and remembering a complex set of choices.

In WordSmith you need plain text files, such as you get if you save a Word .doc as Plain Text (.txt). Any Word .doc files or .pdfs will look crossed out and should not be used: convert them to .txt first.

(10words.TXT is greyed out because it has the hidden attribute)

You can edit the textual date to be attached to any text file within any date range from 4000BC upwards. (On first reading from disk the date will be set to the date that text file was last edited.)

How to do it

Press the button circled in this screen-shot:

A window opens up letting you set text file dates and times. Here below you will see Shakespeare plays with their dates being edited.

Delicacy offers a choice of various time ranges (centuries, years, etc.) which will help ignore excessive detail. If years are chosen as above, month, day and hour of editing are no longer relevant and default to 1st July at 12:00.

File with list of dates, or

If you choose a suitable text file and press the Set dates from List button, each of your chosen text files will be updated if its file-name and a suitable date are found in the list.

The format of the list is

filename<tab>date (formatted YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD for year, month and day).

Examples:

Re-read disk, or

This will simply re-read the disk where the text files are stored. Useful if you made a mistake, or if you changed file-dates using the File Utilities.

Change selected files

This option will set a file-date for any text files you have selected. In the screenshot above, only Macbeth.txt has been selected. Pressing Change selected files would set that one text file to 1850.  

Here we see BNC text files sorted by date. The ones at the top had no date, then the first dated was KNA.XML (a spoken sermon) dated as 1901, which is when the header says the tape-recording was made(!).

Your Documents\wsmith8 folder includes a file with a list of dates for the BNC (BNC dates) and another for the Shakespeare corpus (Shakespeare plays dated plain).

There is also a utility in the File Utilities which can parse text files to generate dates using your own syntax, preparing a text file like this to read in.

You can save the dates and files as favourites so as to re-use this information as often as you like. Especially if you set dates before 1980: Windows doesn't store dates before then in the file-system, so you'd need to save your changes as favourites so as to be able to re-load your corpus with the right dates.

There is a menu option (Edit | Change file dates) for any list of statistics or filenames in the Tools.

See also: using text dates, keywords database timelines.

Opens a toolbar showing some further buttons:

The buttons at the top left let you see the files available as icons, as a list, or with full details (the default) instead.

Random

This re-orders the files (on both sides) in random order.

View in Notepad

Lets you see the text contents in the standard Windows simple word-processor for text files, Notepad.

Check

Checks whether the files selected are available to read (e.g. after loading up Favourites).

Save List

Lets you save any already stored text files as a plain text list (e.g for adding date information).

Zip files

If checked, when loading up a whole folder of text files, WordSmith will automatically include ones from .zip files.

Whether checked or not, if you double-click on a zip file you can enter that as if it were a folder and see the contents. Zip files will be coloured red. In this screen, the historical plays of Shakespeare within a zip file (plays.zip) have been selected.