The New Year is about to roll in, but it's not too late to get the tools that will make your work next year easier than ever before! Read about our year-end sale, and more about the new Orbis+.
We hope that you will welcome the New Year with a new — or updated — copy of Nota Bene! To help make that a reality, we are offering special sale prices — for this weekend only!
30% off for new purchases
30% off for Lingua
30% off for Archiva
20% off for upgrades
The sale ends at midnight on Monday, January 2. The new Orbis+ formats are still available at the price announced in our last newsletter — five new formats for the price of three. See below for details. Please place your order now!
Orbis+
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PDF, DOCX, DOC, RTF & HTML
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We’ve heard from many of you regarding the new Orbis+ formats. Most of you are delighted. Some of you (both those who have started using it, and others who are interested)
have had some questions, which we'll answer in Q & A format below, while others have written us expressing their appreciation of what the new Orbis+ offers.
But first, for those of you who may not have heard about Orbis+, the new Orbis is a giant step forward in allowing you to search all your files, not just your NB files. You can now search PDF files, Word files (DOCX, DOC and RTF) and HTML files. This is like having Google for your personal files. After an initial set up of your Orbis text base, all you need to do is enter your search terms, and you will find what you want when you need it. Very easy.
The price for this new functionality is $39 for the first format, $20 for each additional format, or a special offer of $79 for all 5 formats. This is a late stage beta version. You will automatically get the final version when it is available.
Questions About the New Orbis+
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I just bought the new Orbis. How do I get it?
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| When you place your order, you'll be given a download link to a new release of Nota Bene, 11.5.6, which you will need to install. When doing so, make sure you enter the new product key that you received when you purchased the new formats. You can either enter the new product key during installation, or you can click Help, Active Add-On Modules to enter it.
(At the moment, release 11.5.6 is only available to those who get the new Orbis+, but we'll br providing a maintenance upgrade for all users of NB 11.5 soon.)
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Will Orbis+ work with all PDF’s, including ones that have been processed using OCR (optical character recognition)?
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| Orbis+ can read text in PDF files, which is what most PDF's are composed of, including those that have been scanned using OCR software. But it cannot search images in PDF files, including PDF's that are all images (such as you might find in old facsimile files that were converted to PDF), but in most cases these are in the minority.
Orbis+ provides a "textishness" ranking of each PDF file you include in a textbase, so you can easily get a sense (there's a graphical representation) of which files are searchable.
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How does searching of HTML files work?
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| Unlike the other formats (PDF, DOCX, DOC, and RTF), HTML files are not page-oriented, and they often often contain programs (for example, javascript) and discontinuous text (with lots of call-outs), which can impact indexing and searching. In particular, when indexing HTML files with lots of javascript, or javascript (.JS) files themselves, the text-extraction engines that Orbis+ uses not only extract the text, but often prompt you if you want to open (i.e., run) the javascript file.
- When we first announced Orbis+ two weeks ago, we suggested that users could simply select all files in a folder using *.*, rather than specific file types (such as *.PDF and *.HTML). We didn't anticipate that a number of you would have quite a few javascript files that would ask for confirmation during indexing. To address this, and to allow you to use *.*, we'll be providing a free upgrade soon that will allow you to automatically skip particular file types even when designating *.*. But in the meantime, to avoid the irritating (although harmless) popups during indexing, you should specify the specific types you want to include (that is, *.PDF, *.DOCX, and *.HTML, rather than the global *.*).
- The Orbis extraction engines merely pull text out of HTML files; they do not have any kind of semantic or other text analysis engine to weed out unwanted advertisements, links, and the like. (An engine like that is actually in the Archiva web-capture program, but not, at least currently, in Orbis.) But although you might thus get more matches than you were hoping for, you can always ignore those that aren't from the main body of the page. In addition, you can always open the full source HTML file to further evaluate the usefulness of any match.
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| What exactly does Orbis+ search?
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| Orbis + searches the actual text of the files you specify. It does not search filenames, or the “metadata” of files (such as author, version number, etc.).
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Praise for the New Orbis+
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With the new Orbis I have indexed large, densely formatted, painfully complex *.docx files that my team of translators has produced over the past several years, all of them pushing Word so hard that the program breaks down frequently (we should probably use Adobe InDesign for these tasks, but it ain't gonna happen), dozens of Style Sheets, half the text in English and half in a Tibetan font, and Orbis has handled them without so much as a hiccup.
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Wow! I've been waiting for this! All those PDFs ....
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The generous new limit on the number of sub-folders allowed me to index my Zotero storage (mainly PDF, some DOC, DOCX, and TXT).
Time: ~ 20 minutes
Files: 695 (in over 1000 folders)
Size: just under 1GB
Impressive!
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The new Orbis seems to work fine and as claimed! With the huge variety of machines out there, as well as operators, it’s a miracle that any program can function at all. I am in awe of the programers, and very grateful of NB’s support (there when needed).
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Orbis should make the Great Dragonfly proud. It makes NB even more the best...... can something be said to be even more unique?
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Make your New Year and more productive — and more enjoyable — by getting these unique tools designed specifically to enhance your scholarly research and writing!
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Best wishes to all of you from all of us at Nota Bene.
Anne Putnam
718-382-1500
www.notabene.com
sales@notabene.com
technicalsupport@notabene.com
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