How full-text search works:

Full-text search uses an index of words found in the project, together with the locations where the words are found. This means that it is not possible to search for phrases because the index only knows about the locations of the individual words.

Searching for exact words:

You can use quotes to search for exact words. For example, cat will find cat, catalog and advocate, but "cat" will only find cat. This can be combined with wildcard characters – "cat*" will find catalog but not advocate.

String Constants / Translation:

The String Constants table is a list of the texts that are used in the user interface of the Search function. You can edit the default texts in the Text column directly. HTML tags are not permitted here, you can only enter plain text.

(Load / Save Constants):

In addition to editing the string constants yourself you can also load sets of constants for a variety of different languages, and save your own constants to external files.

The constants are stored in Unicode text files, so you can store your texts in any language. The files have the extension *.zlang and are stored in the \Templates\html folder in the Help & Manual program directory, which is normally C:\Program Files\HelpAndManual4. We have included the original translations from the full-text search programmers but new translations are welcome.

Exclude these words from search:

This list defines common words you don't want to include in the full-text search index to save space. This is an important point because the JavaScript full-text index has to be completely downloaded from your server by the user's browser before a search can be executed.

In a reasonable-sized project this index file can easily be 300 to 400KB or larger, and excluding common words can help to reduce its size.

You can add your own words and delete existing words. Just click in the list and edit, and only enter one word per line. Copy and paste is supported.

Note that this list must contain at least one word. If you delete all the entries it will default to the standard entries when you save your project.

Skip words with less than ... characters:

This is another function that decreases the size of the index. Words with less then 3 characters are usually not very meaningful and excluding them from the search is strongly recommended.

Word-joining characters:

The indexing function automatically treats words linked with the characters you specify here as single words. For example, if the "-" character is included here ready-mix and readymix would both be treated as the same single word.

You can edit the list to add your own characters or delete existing characters.

Enable "Sort results by date":

When this is activated users can sort the search results by score (relevance of the topic found) or date.

Search is Accent-Insensitive:

This converts accents and umlauts to their base characters so that the search doesn't make a difference between base characters and their accented versions.

This is strongly recommended for highly-accented languages like French and German, as it will make the searches much more effective for the user.

Support for single-case languages:

This creates a case-insensitive search index. You don't need this for western languages but it is a requirement for Asian languages. It is also helpful for languages like German in which all common nouns are capitalized.

Let me edit HTML code directly:

Activate this check box to view and edit the HTML code of the template. See below for details on direct HTML editing mode.

This button automatically clears the HTML template and reloads the default template. Use with caution – this function completely overwrites all your editing changes!

If you select the button accidentally just click Cancel.

Text on top of Search page:

The text here defines what appears at the top of the Search pane in the Browser-based Help shown in the user's browser. HTML tags are allowed.

The default code inserts the title of the Full-text Search and links to TOC and Index. Please do not change this code unless you really understand how it works.

Here too, this button automatically clears the HTML template and reloads the default template. Use with caution – this function completely overwrites all your editing changes!

If you select the button accidentally just click Cancel.

Editing window:

The editor provides full HTML syntax highlighting to make editing easier. To enlarge the window for easier editing just resize the Project Properties window.