Copyright: Copyright 1997 Guild Press of Indiana
Citation: Copyright 1997 Guild Press of Indiana


 General User Interface v1.0  Win 3.1 Help Index

Commonly Asked Questions

Using the Controls

Topic lists

Full Text Searching

Bookmarks

Printing

Contacting Guild Press

Commands

File menu

Edit menu

View menu

Help menu


File menu commands

The File menu offers the following commands:

Print topic	Prints the current topic or selected portions of it.
Exit	Exits The Civil War CD-ROM v1.0


Edit menu commands

The Edit menu offers the following commands:

Copy selection	Copies data from the document to the clipboard.


View menu commands

The View menu offers the following commands:

Search results	Shows last search results


Options menu

You can change a number of option variables by selecting this menu item.

 Text Color. Permits changing the default text color.

 Search Hit Color. Permits changing the color of search hit highlights.

 Set Kerning Boundary. Permits kerning of text to be turned on. This should be kept at 0 normally for performance reasons.

 Selection Color. Permits changing the color of selections.

 Set NEAR number of words. Permits change to the number of words implied by the NEAR search operator. NEAR means within this many words.


Help menu commands

The Help menu offers the following commands, which provide you assistance with this application:

Help Topics	Offers you an index to topics on which you can get help.
About	Displays the version number of this application.


File Exit command
Exit command (File menu)

Use this command to end your session.  You can also use the Close command on the application Control menu.

Shortcuts

Keys:	ALT+F4


Copy command (Edit menu)

Use this command to copy selected data onto the clipboard.  This command is unavailable if there is no data currently selected.

Copying data to the clipboard replaces the contents previously stored there.

Shortcuts

Keys:	CTRL+C


Scroll bars

Displayed at the right and bottom edges of the document window.  The scroll boxes inside the scroll bars indicate your vertical and horizontal location in the document.  You can use the mouse to scroll to other parts of the document.

<< Describe the actions of the various parts of the scrollbar, according to how they behave in your application. >>


System Minimize Command
Minimize command (application Control menu)

Use this command to reduce the The Civil War CD-ROM v1.0  window to an icon.

Shortcut

Keys:	ALT+F9


Maximize command (System menu)

Use this command to enlarge the active window to fill the available space.

Shortcut

Keys:	CTRL+F10 enlarges a document window.


No Help Available

No help is available for this area of the window.


No Help Available

No help is available for this message box.


Getting Started

Generally, the first thing to do is to maximize the program by pressing the middle button.

Information is displayed in the topic window. Click here for an explanation of topics. The program first starts to the opening graphic page of the database. Clicking on one of the four icons in the picture permits selection of various components of the database.

Click here for a complete description of the controls.

Full text searching is described more completely here.


Commonly Asked Questions

 I searched for something and the results don't look right.

When searching for a phrase, such as "14th Indiana", you have to put it inside of quotes: "14TH INDIANA" rather than 14TH INDIANA without quotes. Otherwise the system is searching for the equivalent of: 14TH AND INDIANA.

 How do I know what page number I'm on?

The original page number is in red, designed to be prominent without intrusive to reading. For topics which do not start at the beginning of a page, [pg. NNN con't] is inserted for easy referencing. In addition, the Win 95 version of the interface has a constantly updated page window which shows the current page number in the upper left hand corner above the topic window.

A book identifier is prefixed to every page number as well. This has a very useful benefit. Any such page identifier is unique in the entire compilation and so can be easily searched for.

 I want to search for a regiment, how do I do it?

The easiest way to find most references to a particular regiment are to use, for example: "14TH INDIANA" and also the number spelled out: "FOURTEENTH INDIANA." Also, search for the names of officers closely associated with the regiments and be sure to look at Dyer's Compendium if it's a Union regiment.

 I searched for (some name) and he didn't appear.

There could be several reasons for this. The name might appear differently than what you typed, such as "General Zag" rather than "John M. Zag". Try the NEAR operator in a search, for example: GENERAL NEAR ZAG.

He might not appear at all -- millions of men who fought in the war are not mentioned in the official records, unless they were killed or there was some other distinction. There is some chance, although great care was taken, that the name is not spelled correctly due to an error in our conversion process. If you find such an error, please let us know (email: support@guildpress.com) and we will be sure to correct it for future releases of the product.

 What are the numbers used in the Correspondence sections?

In order to make the huge sections for Union and Confederate Correspondence more manageable, Guild Press broke the sections down (at appropriate logical breaks) into roughly 25 page pieces per topic. No information is lost. The numbering is particular Guild Press and of no particular consequence. The original page numbering is of course retained, as it is for every book on the CD-ROM.


What's a Topic?

The Civil War CD-ROM is composed of tens of thousands of topics. A topic is physically a discrete scrolling region of text. Generally, each report is associated with a single topic. Large Correspondence sections are broken down into topics of 25-50 pages each.

Each topic has a non-scrolling region and a scrolling region. The non-scrolling region, at the top of the screen, contains important context information about the topic, such as the book identifier (Serial number and Volume/Part number, as well as other context information.) When printing, the non-scrolling region is always printed, even if printing a selected portion of text.

Topics make a gigantic database of well over 100,000 pages far easier to handle. They permit the system to show prebuilt topic titles when retrieving search hits and when creating bookmarks. They also make boolean searches, AND/OR, sensible, because the scope of the AND/OR is a single topic. Without topics, AND/OR searches effectively become meaningless, because there is no logical scope of application, except perhaps for a book, which is so large as to be meaningless.

Hot key shortcuts for dealing with topic navigation are:

<Home>	To start of topic
<End>	To end of topic
<Tab>	Next search hit
<Shift><Tab>	Previous search hit
<Shift><Page Down>	Next topic
<Shift><Page Up>	Previous topic
<Down>	Scroll down one line
<Up>	Scroll up one line
<Page Up>	Scroll up one page
<Page Down>	Scroll down one page
<Left>	Scroll left
<Right>	Scroll right


Using the Controls

Click on a label or a control above to display the appropriate description.

Start

Show opening selection screen.

Index

Open Index dialog box. This permits selecting a book from the database, then the topics in the book, and selection of a particular topic.

Search

Enter a search query here, then press the [Qry] button or press <Enter> to start the search.

Next Highlight

Jumps to the next search hit in the current topic.

Show History List

This shows the topics that have been visited. Double clicking on any one brings you to that topic. New topics visited are still added to the end of the list, not to that point in the history list clicked upon.

Go Back

This goes back to the previously visited topic and removes that entry from the history list. You can go all the way back to the opening screen topic or the first 500 topics.

Previous Topic

Jumps to the previous topic (such as a report) in the current book, unless you are already in the first topic in the book.

Next Topic

Jumps to the next topic (such as a report) in the current book, unless you're at the end of the book.


Topic Indexes
Topic Lists

Clicking the [Index] button brings up a listing of the books on the CD-ROM:

To see a listing of all of the topics in a particular book, you double click on it. Selecting the first part of Dyer's Compendium would display:

Then you can scroll to a topic of interest and double click on it to select it, displaying the topic.


Full Text Searching
Finding Information  Full Text Searching

Boolean operators   Constrained searching

The most powerful capability that computers bring to the huge amount of information in the Official Records is the previously impossible ability to index and search for every word (except for a few very common words such as the, and, etc.)

You initiate a search by clicking on the SEARCH button, which brings up the following dialog box:

You then enter a search phrase and press the <Enter> key or punch the [Ok] button to initiate the search. A search can be interrupted by pressing the [Stop Search] button, but the actual search is usually extremely fast. What is time consuming in a search is retrieving the topic titles from the CD-ROM. If your search exceeds 300 hits, a warning box appears and asks you if you would like to continue it. If your search exceeds 2,000 hits you may not proceed at all. Generally the solution is to limit the books searched as described below, or to constrain your query further, also described below.

It is very important to keep in mind that you have to place a phrase in quotes. A phrase is a search term containing spaces, such as a full name or a regiment identifier. In other words, to search for the 14th Indiana, you would enter: "14TH INDIANA" or "FOURTEENTH INDIANA". If using boolean operators, described below, put only the search phrase itself in quotes. For example, "14TH INDIANA" AND KIMBALL and not "14TH INDIANA AND KIMBALL". This would fail to work as expected.

 Constrained searching

If you wish to search the entire database for your phrase, select the "All Topics" option. To constrain your search to just selected books, select the "Selected Books Only" option. You can then click on each book to search, such as:

In this example, a search is being entered for "meade" occuring in the Army Official Record serial numbers 43,44,45 -- the Gettysburg volume.

 Displaying search hits

After successfully performing the search, a dialog box comes up. To use the "meade" example, the results are:

With a list of topics displayed you can double click on one of them and it will display the topic in the topic display window. You can minimize the search hits box to get it out of the way, or close it entirely and redisplay it later via the "View" menu.

 Boolean Operators

Searches can include so-called "boolean operators." This is a fancy name for the ability to use NOT, AND, OR, and NEAR in your search expression. For example, to find all occurances of INDIANA near the word KIMBALL, you'd enter:

INDIANA NEAR KIMBALL

This will find all topics that contain the word INDIANA near the word KIMBALL. The exact number of words apart (at most) is determined by setting a variable under the Options menu item.

By contrast, INDIANA AND KIMBALL would search for all topics that contain both INDIANA and KIMBALL anywhere in the topic. This is where breaking entire books apart into manageable topics, such as individual reports, is very useful. Otherwise, the range of AND would have to be, perhaps, an entire book, which would be almost worthless.

INDIANA OR KIMBALL would find all topics that contain either INDIANA or KIMBALL.

INDIANA NOT KIMBALL would find all topics that contain INDIANA but not KIMBALL.

Search expressions can be combined for more complex searches by using parentheses. For example:

INDIANA NOT (KIMBALL OR MORTON)

would find all topics containing INDIANA but not KIMBALL or MORTON.


Managing Research (Bookmarking)
Bookmarks

You can keep track of topics of interest by adding a bookmark to it. This is done by selecting the "Bookmarks" menu item. You'll see:

The current topic title is the default bookmark title, but you can change this to whatever you like. Press the [Add] button to add it to the list. Up to 500 bookmarks can be defined. To delete a mark, highlight it and press the [Delete] button. To jump to one, either double click on it or highlight it and press the [Go To] button.

The Win 95 version of the user interface has a radically more powerful bookmarking capability. Bear in mind that bookmark files are not compatible between the two interfaces.


Printing

You can print either an entire topic or a selected portion of a topic. Either way, select the [Print topic] menu item under the [File] menu. If you choose to print only a selected portion (strongly recommended for large topics, especially Union or Confederate Correspondence sections), note that the topic title will still appear for context. Footnotes do not print.

Printing text will print at the same magnification as currently selected for display. This can be a benefit if you want to print some particularly huge table, either in normal portrait or in landscape printing mode.


Contacting Guild Press

If you have a question, please read the "Commonly Asked Questions" first before contacting us. Guild Press of Indiana may be reached at:

E-Mail:

support@guildpress.com

Phone:

317-848-6421

Mailing Address:

435 Gradle Drive

Carmel, IN 46032

Also check out the Guild Press web site at:

www.guildpress.com

for updated information on product offerings.

We're always interested in hearing about problems or typos that you may encounter when using the product. Please try to use e-mail first if you can. If you tell us about a typo or other mistake, include the volume identifier (preferably the serial number of the book if in the Official Records) and the page number, and preferably a paragraph copied and pasted from the text which contains the problem.