 |
 | Home | Contact Us | FAQ | Search & Site Map | Link to Us |
 | Sign In | Join | Other 45 Sites in Network |
Mac Forum / Applications / Word / June 2008Spotlight/Finder
I am using a PowerMac G4 with OSX 10.4.11 Tiger. I have 1G memory. I did some experimenting with Spotlight and Finder and found what I believe to be a problem. I compile documents of news articles in chronological order, one after another, on a particular subject; one is entitled FinancialMarkets/Global. Articles relating to this title are compiled in this particular document. I use Microsoft Word, in Office 2001. When the documents reach around 95K characters, I begin a new document. If a document reaches 100K, it doesn't register in the info frame at the bottom of the window, so I keep them under this figure. I label them FinancialMarkets/GlobalA, and FinancialMarkets/GlobalB, and etc. The FinancialMarkets/Global document is at present around 32.8K, with articles beginning around 1995. I have been following the French trader Kerviel and his exploits with his enormous losses in the marketplace that stunned the French banking industry. I had compiled these articles in the FinancialMarkets/Global document. I attempted to find this document with Spotlight to add another article to it and Spotlight didn't find it. I put in the name kerviel. I tried the methods of forced indexing and nothing worked. I put in Spotlight some earlier names of individuals from this document and it worked OK. Finally, today, I put in the name kerviel early in the document, like around 20 characters. Spotlight found the document. I moved the name further into the document and it still worked OK. I kept moving the name further into the document until Spotlight didn't find it anymore. The first article with the name Kerviel was at 9.1K characters. The last place that Spotlight worked was around 8.1K characters in this document. I tried this experiment in another document with another name with the same results. Spotlight will index a document up to around 8.2K and no further. This is unacceptable with the structure that I have compiled. What can be done to correct this glaring deficiency? Certainly a well-tested matter, and I'm certain that your findings will be both interesting & helpful to some of those who frequent this group, but I believe you're preaching to the wrong congregation:-) Both Finder & Spotlight are OS X features - neither MS nor any other software developer determines how those features work. If there appears to be a limit to how "deep" Spotlight searches into any given file it is established by Apple. Likewise, if the parameter can be adjusted the setting would be in the Preferences for Spotlight, itself. You may get some useful insights from those who frequent the Apple Discussions, many of whom are quite technically oriented. They may have some suggestions to offer which go beyond the typical user level. This link is directly to the OS X 10.4.x Spotlight forum: http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=757 Regards |:>) Bob Jones [MVP] Office:Mac On 6/28/08 9:11 AM, in article C48BA2C9.AFD2%indago@att.net, "indago" > I am using a PowerMac G4 with OSX 10.4.11 Tiger. I have 1G memory. I did > some experimenting with Spotlight and Finder and found what I believe to be [quoted text clipped - 27 lines] > This is unacceptable with the structure that I have compiled. What can be > done to correct this glaring deficiency? 080628 8:56 - CyberTaz posted: > Certainly a well-tested matter, and I'm certain that your findings will be > both interesting & helpful to some of those who frequent this group, but I [quoted text clipped - 50 lines] >> This is unacceptable with the structure that I have compiled. What can be >> done to correct this glaring deficiency? I've been to the discussion areas on the Apple forums at the Apple Site and posted this problem but the only responses are more complaints from others who are having problems with Spotlight, or the usual "fix" of forcing the indexing. On Usenet, on a Mac forum for the OSX, I did get this response: ------------------------------------------- It's not initially clear where the problem really lies. Gathering information from a document to be indexed for Spotlight is the responsibility of small chunks of plugin code called importers. So right up front the first possibility is that the importer for Word documents is only submitting the first 8k of the content to the Spotlight engine, and in that case the vendor that wrote the plugin needs to fix it. On the other hand, it's possible that when indexing content (which is handled differently from other indexed metadata) the importer *is* giving Spotlight everything and the engine is giving up after 8k. From a single, very quick test here it looks like the former; I was just able to find a 32k AppleWorks document by searching for a made up word that only occurs at the end. The solution then is to complain to whatever company provided the plugin (who I presume is Microsoft, but best to check these things). In a terminal, mdimport -nd1 <filename> will output a message telling you the path of the importer plugin used; from there, a Get Info will likely identify the vendor. --------------------------------------------- Perhaps the .doc format wasn't constructed to provide more. However, I did some quick checking with .docx format produced by Word 2008. Similar to the test you cited I created a 172KB document comprising 195,126 characters (249,156 with spaces) with a unique string at the very end. Spotlight had no problem finding it instantly when that string was used for the search. Regards |:>) Bob Jones [MVP] Office:Mac On 6/28/08 10:08 PM, in article C48C58CB.AFF1%indago@att.net, "indago" > 080628 8:56 - CyberTaz posted: > [quoted text clipped - 80 lines] > will likely identify the vendor. > --------------------------------------------- > Perhaps the .doc format wasn't constructed to provide more. However, I did > some quick checking with .docx format produced by Word 2008. Similar to the > test you cited I created a 172KB document comprising 195,126 characters > (249,156 with spaces) with a unique string at the very end. Spotlight had no > problem finding it instantly when that string was used for the search. A long time ago I looked into this when Tiger's Spotlight was not returning hits on Word docs (.doc format) when the first occurrence was more than 200K characters from the beginning of the file. I dimly recall that the author of the importer (Apple, Microsoft or some other entity - I forget) had somewhere stated that was deliberate design. My solution then was to print to PDF and use either Preview's or Spotlight search (which of course was perfectly OK for the full length of the PDF). Since both were an order of magnitude faster than Word's own internal search of a single document, that was quite useful while collaborating on a single large document with several versions, All the PC toting people would look to me in meetings to find references several hundred pages into the damn thing. Matters Spotlight have only got better with Leopard. I have no first-hand knowledge of the state of the mdi importer for Word 2008 and .docx files. Nor do I expect gain such knowledge in the near future. I retrieved the above 'collaboration' document from archive and I can confirm that the Word 2004 mdi importer I currently have on this Leopard machine still fails to find matches more than 30-odd pages into it.  SignatureTo de-mung my e-mail address:- fsnospam$elliott$$ PGP Fingerprint: 1A96 3CF7 637F 896B C810 E199 7E5C A9E4 8E59 E248 |
Reply to this Message |
 Sign In
 Join
 My Latest Posts My Monitored Threads My Blog My Photo Gallery My Profile My Homepage Start New Thread Enable EMail Alerts Rate this Thread
|
©2008 Advenet LLC Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
This website includes both content owned or controlled by Advenet as well as content owned or controlled by third parties.