Orbis Overview

Orbis is a free-form text retrieval system accessible within Nota Bene. It gives you instant access to thousands of pages of existing text -- research notes, lectures, random jottings, lab reports, interview transcripts, field notes, lists, paragraphs from previous papers and chapters of books. Orbis makes everything you've ever written in Nota Bene or imported from an outside source accessible. Thousands of documents can be searched simultaneously with the results instantly displayed and available to you for reference or for inserting in an open document.

Orbis is the ideal tool for managing a career's worth of notes, papers and general information. There are no practical limits to the amount of information that can be handled: Technically, up to 16 million files with up to 358 million entries (e.g., paragraphs) can be searched simultaneously. Use Orbis to find old notes, to make new connections and to come up with new ideas. Your old notes and papers can become a valuable and easily searchable source of information for your continuing writing and research.

Traditionally, Orbis has been used for searching NB files. The version of Orbis that is included in the NB Workstation still does that. But you can now purchase additional Orbis+ formats that allow you to use Orbis to search PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF and HTML files as well as NB files.

Popup Orbis (F4): Popup Orbis makes the functionality of Orbis available in a small popup screen that can be open while you edit your document. It must be used to create automatic textbases and it is recommended for general use. See Popup Orbis.

Full Orbis (Ctrl+Shift+F4): The original Orbis screen is familiar to those who used older versions of Nota Bene (version 13 and prior). Full Orbis can be used for general use, and it must be used to create user-defined textbases and synonym lists. See Orbis Screen.

When you do an Orbis search, you search a "textbase" (a specified set of files and/or folders) for "keywords" (all words except an omit list are keywords), and Orbis returns the "entries" (an entry is usually a paragraph) that contain you search terms. In addition to a search for a single word, searches for phrases or Boolean search strings are supported.

If you have not purchased the additional Orbis+ formats, you must have files in NB format or in TXT format. New users who do not have Orbis+ may want to convert some of their files from other word processing formats to Nota Bene so that they can be searched by Orbis. Other than making sure that the files to be searched are NB or TXT files, you do not need to do anything to prepare your files for use with Orbis. There is no data entry with Orbis, and no special formatting required. If you have purchased Orbis+, you can search PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF and HTML files as well as NB files, and there is no need to convert these files to NB format.

You will need to know where the files that you want to search are located on your computer. They can be on your computer or on the cloud -- any location that you can access. Many people have a series of subfolders for different purposes (e.g., one or more research folders for your academic work, and other folders for personal files like correspondence, travel, family, recipes, etc.). A well organized system of saving files in different folders will make it easy for you to use Orbis for searching efficiently.

When you use Orbis to search your files, you search a defined set of files. That set of files is called a textbase. The textbase you search can be either of the following:

Automatic Textbase: In Popup Orbis, certain textbases can be created automatically. For example, you can search all of the files in the current folder (with or without subfolders), or all of the 100 most recently edited files, or all note-taking files linked to the Ibidem database in the active file, or all Ibidem records. These textbases are created automatically. All you need to do is choose which textbase you want to search. See Automatic Textbases.

User-Defined Textbase: Experienced Orbis users may want to define a set of files that can be searched anytime. You can create a textbase that consists of specified files (e.g. the chapters of the book you are writing) or of specified folders and subfolders (e.g., the folders that contain your research papers, reading notes, and other research material), or both. When folders are specified, new files that are later added to those folders will automatically be included in the textbase. See New Textbase.

Orbis handles text in units called "entries." An entry is a unit of text that will be retrieved when you do an Orbis search. Paragraphs -- units of text separated by hard returns -- are used as entries in all automatic textbases, and in most user-defined textbases. Advanced users may find that a different type of entry, such as sentences, pages (separated by hard page breaks) or whole files, is more suitable for some textbases. You can also add special markers to your files to manually define the beginning and end of each entry. For more information, see Entries.

Orbis retrieves entries (paragraphs) based on the "keywords" that the entry contains. You do not need to worry about inserting keywords in your documents, because Orbis will treat all words as keywords (except for words on a user-modifiable omit list). There is no need for you to decide in advance which words will be searchable. You will be able to search for any word that was used in any file that is in your textbase (except words on the omit list) and Orbis will retrieve all entries that contain the target word (or words).

The needs of many users are fully met with no effort to define keywords, but advanced features are available to provide experienced users with additional control. For example, special non-printing keywords can be added to your documents, and synonym lists can automatically expand your search to include synonyms.

Once a textbase is created, it can be searched. When you search a textbase, you simultaneously search all of the files that are defined as being part of the textbase. You can search for one word, a phrase, or you can construct elaborate search strings. Orbis will find every paragraph (or other defined entry type) that matches your search terms and present the results in a convenient table format. Click on one of the results in the table, and you will see the full paragraph in an adjacent window. The full paragraph can be expanded to see the context (paragraph(s) before and/or after the retrieved text in the original document), and retrieved text can be inserted in an open file. All of this is done without even opening the source file. Of course, if you want to open the source file, you can do so. Orbis can search thousands (or millions!) of files and provide the results almost instantaneously. By the time you have typed in the term you are searching for, you will have the results!