Some software tools for Indology

[Harry Spier]

Dear list members,

If anyone is doing word searchs, analysis of e-texts with diacriticals,
conversions from one encoding to another, or any other manipulation of
e-texts you may want to look at the text editor TEXTPAD (available for
windows only) as shareware ($27.00) from www.textpad.com which has the
following features ( and much more) that I found very useful for this sort
of thing.

1)"Regular expressions" allowed in the find command.  This is a string
definition metalanguage that allows you to specify almost any pattern of
letters or groups of letters in the find command.

2) Characters can be specified by their character codes.  This allows search
strings to include letters with diacriticals and it makes it very easy to
convert an e-text with diacriticals to any other encoding either with or
without diacriticals.

3) "Bookmarking". You can specify bookmarking in your find commands which
will then mark all lines with the string you are searching for.  You can
then copy the bookmarked lines to another window to print or do further work
on.

4) A "sort" command with up to three different user defined sort columns.

5) A keystroke macro facility which allows you to execute a series of
keystrokes on a single line save it as a macro but then execute it on each
line in the file.  This made it very easy to append a copy of the word
containing the string I was interested in to the start of each line and then
sort the results alphabetically.

Also if anyone is doing any work with audio recordings they may want to look
at the audio editor Cooledit 2000 for $69.00 from www.syntrillium.com.  You
can cut, paste, copy, position cursors on the audio file as easily as if it
was a text file.  You can display either raw wave or spectrogram and
spectrum. I looked at a few others and it seemed the best value for money.
I also found two free software packages specifically designed for phonetic
analysis of speech.  "speech analyzer" from SIL at www.sil.org and "SFS
tools for speech research" from University College London at
www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/sfs/ .  This is not public domain software but
is available as long as the programs and documentation are not modified and
the copywrite notice is not removed from them.

Hope this is of use to some members.



Harry Spier
371 Brickman Rd.
Hurleyville, New York
USA 12747

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com