#Hypertext Software
2 messages in this thread
Has anyone had experience using a hypertext software package (e.g.
Guide, HyperTies, HyperWriter) for pre-mastering and accessing a full text
CD-ROM database? If so, would you please comment on the advantages or
disadvantages of using this type of software as opposed to the convention
text retrieval software.
Thanks, Phil
I haven't used one of the commercial packages you mention for generating a
hypertext cd-rom, but i have created several cdrom hypertext titles.
Actually, the titles i have worked on are more of a cross between hypertext
and conventional text retrieval. The disks are those produced by Xiphias
and do full text inversion on the source material. When using a product,
any word on the screen is hot (instead of just specfic, manually authored
links). Clicking a word runs a conventional index search and gives a list
of articles that contain the word. Recent titles (Grolier's for CDTV
Version 2) ranks the articles by # of occurances of the word.
I understand Windows has a tool very similar to this, but also allows
manual links. The benifit of Full Text Inversion is that many relevant
links are created automatically. The problem is that there are many
irrelevant links also created. Depending on your product, those
'irrelevant' links can actually be very interesting for browsing.
Straight hypertext tools often require LOTS of manual editorial work to
generate the (hi quality) links. I'm also not sure how their file layout
would translate to CD. (how many disk seeks are required, etc)
Jerry Isdale