Common Words dialog

The Common Words view (Views:Common Words), new to v.3.5.0, visualises the most common words in 3 levels of scope:

• Note. This is the default.
• Section. A note and its descendants.
• Document. The entire document.

For note and section, each distinct occurrence of a word is counted. For the document level view, Tinderbox counts the number of notes that contain a word 1 or more times. The display contains up to 100 words - less if there are fewer valid words in scope. Regardless of scope, words of fewer than four characters are ignored. (v4.2.5+ indexes words from 2 characters or more). Thus, the word 'blue' can be found by this dialog whereas 'red', having only three characters, can not be listed as a common word.

Changes to text in open note windows are not reflected in the dialog. If necessary, close and re-open a note window in order that the Common words list is refreshed to reflect recent edits.

The font sizes in the Common Words display are automatically chosen to fit the available space.

Clicking on any word opens the search (Find) window and searches for that word in the text or title. Note that Common Words only indexes full words, which then search indexes substrings; clicking on 'clock' will also find notes that refer to 'clocks'. Besides a note's text and title, Common Words also indexes user string attributes. Thus, results from a normal Find and one called via Common Words may differ in their results.

With the Common Words dialog open, two Edit menu items have a special function:

• Copy. Places a copy of the selected view, as styled text, on the clipboard.
• Copy view picture. Places a copy of the selected view, as an image, on the clipboard.

Stoplist words: Tinderbox ships with a default list of very common English words which is found in the stoplist.txt, a Tinderbox configuration file; see the latter for how to add a user-customised version. To allow users to set an additional stoplist of words that Common Words will ignore, v4.0.0 Common Words now looks for a note named "stoplist". If one is found, the words in that note are added to the general list of words that Common Words ignores - for the current TBX. From v4.2.5 the list is case-insensitive.

User-added stop words should be entered in all-lower-case, regardless of the case of the words in the targeted TBX text. Thus to stop 'Tinderbox' appearing in common Words, add 'tinderbox' to your stoplist. The same holds true for acronyms - for 'NASA' or 'AAPL' add 'nasa' or 'aapl' to the list. Words can be added to the stoplist file or note either one per line or as words with a single space between them; note the latter means that phrases will be interpreted at word level (which should achieve the same effect).

From v3.5.3, Common Words view is less restrictive in its definition of 'word'; previously, it rejected words that contained characters that don't occur in English.

From v3.6.0, if no note is currently selected, the document pane of the dialog shows common words for the whole TBX file; in previous versions it was empty in this context.