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WordSmith Tools Manual

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highlighter

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The point of it

 

is to show a text and selected words (or phrases) you want to highlight. Here is an example from the Dickens novel Bleak House, highlighting 314 key words.

 

highlighter_text

 

How to do it...

 

In File Utilities, choose the Highlighter tab, your text file and a plain text list of words you're interested in.

 

highlighter_page

You can edit the list of words if necessary using the Edit button. When ready, press Load text and words.

 

Highlighting

Right-click to choose between highlighting all words or just one word you've selected at the left. Press the red exclamation in the status bar if losing patience.  You can see progress marked here in the status bar.

highlighter_progress

Highlighting lots of words in a huge text takes time... finding over 300 words which each occur many times in this 800-page novel took about 6 minutes on my PC.

 

Trimming

Right-click to trim the lines of the text. This removes unnecessary blank lines.

 

Save as RTF

Right-clicking lets you save the text in Rich Text format and if you have an editor capable of showing RTF you will get to see the result.

 

Format of the word list

This is plain text, either one word per line or with commas separating items. Multi-word units are allowed. Searches are by default whole-word searches, case insensitive. You can alter that using the standard WordSmith search syntax.

 

The arrows

These are to take you forwards and backwards through the highlighted words. To move only from one instance of a specific word, select that word first in the left display. In the picture above, Ada is selected. The current selected word has a blue first letter.