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1994-04-04
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INSTADEX VERSION 1.0
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
(c) Copyright 1994 Pat Williams, All Rights Reserved.
HortIdeas Publishing, 460 Black Lick Rd., Gravel Switch, KY 40328
In these days of Internet posts and desktop-published documents, the disks of
many PC users are overflowing with text files. It can be difficult to remember
what's in the files -- and even more difficult to find what you remember! It
is even harder for a person who didn't originally create the text files to
locate information of interest in the files.
Instabase converts (even large) text files into easy-to-use, fully-indexed
electronic documents (INSTABASES) that can be distributed (for a fee, if you
desire) to others. INSTABASES even save disk space! An INSTABASE allows access
to ALL of the text in the original files, so you no longer need the original
files (except for archival purposes), yet the INSTABASE is compressed so that
it actually takes less space than the original files.
INSTABASES are useful whenever you have a large amount of PC-readable text
that you would like to distribute to others or need better access to for
yourself. Here at HortIdeas Publishing, we use INSTABASES in several ways.
Here are some examples:
1. We publish a monthly gardening newsletter (if you are an avid gardener,
request a free sample from the address given above). Several subscribers have
requested a computer-readable version in addition to the hard-copy version.
Since we desktop publish, the text is on disk, but not in a reader-friendly
format. By Instadexing, we can easily make a reader-friendly electronic
document for each issue. With an Instabase version of the newsletter, the
reader need only type in the word "rose" to "instantly" see portions of the
text containing the word "rose."
2. We read several newsgroups and mailing lists on the Internet, resulting in
a huge amount of text to be dealt with. We delete most of it as soon as we
read it, but we like to keep some (OK, a lot...) of it for future reference.
We download these posts, and when we have saved a week or a month of files on
one topic, we make an INSTABASE of them. It takes less space, and it is far
easier to find things in the INSTABASE than in the original files.
3. We publish a journal which is partly composed of edited e-mail posts from
an Internet mailing list. We download the posts to files and make an INSTABASE
for each month of them, then use Instabase's "gather" function to write
sections of the text to a separate file for further editing.
To see how easy it is to use an INSTABASE, you can read the Instabas
documentation itself as an INSTABASE. At the DOS prompt simply type:
INSTABAS INSTADOC
After the program starts, press Enter to read the documentation. Then you can
try the various features discussed in the documentation.