Partial Search Match

[warnere]

Folks,

Is there anyway to have the search engine search for partial matches. Our company has part numbers in their literaturw (pdf) and we would like to be able to have the customer type in the first few digits and get a reasonable search result. (e.g. search term: 40DF would give a result where the actual number is 40DF001245., basically a partial search - finding any term/word with that particular matching)

Any help would be appreciated - I love the new version!

Eric

[David]

You can do a partial match with the wildcard character *.

So 40DF* would find 40DF001245

You can also force it to be on all the time, but we don't recommend it. (Except for Asian languages)

Or if you only have a few specific cases to handle you could define Synonyms. Which could make, for example, a search for 40DF equal to a search for 40DF001245

[jroosevelt]

Along the lines of this question, is there any sort of default synonym list that can be uploaded to Zoom? I'd really like if words like "quick" and "quickly" were considered as synonyms, but it woudl be a royal pain to manually enter every such variation.

Thanks.

[David]

There is no default synonym list. It would be hard to do because of the number of different languages we support. So at least at the moment you need to manually add synonyms that you want.

[jroosevelt]

Is there a way to import a synonym list from one configuration to another?

In our setup, we'd be using Zoom to index our different Help systems for various applications. We're still evaluating Zoom, but I'm thinking that we would have a number of individual configurations - one for each Help system. However, it would be nice if we could create a standard synonym list in one configuration that we could easily bring over to other configurations.

Thanks for your assistance.

[Ray]

There is no feature to import a synonym list at this point. It is something we are considering, and is likely to add for a future release however.

However, if you are technically adept at modifying text files, you could potentially copy and paste the synonym list from between your ZCFG files using a Unicode capable text editor (the ZCFG file is a text file encoded in 16-bit Unicode). You would have to be careful with not breaking the ZCFG file format however.

[whk]

Not with PDFs

Ray, In his original query Warnere mentioned he uses PDF files. Wildcards have a problem with these. Searching for blue* in my PDF files gives a proper list of results, but clicking on one brings up Adobe (vs with the proper file loaded but with Adobe saying it can't find blue* in the document even though it contains bluebird or similar.
Walter K

[Ray]

Walter - what you are describing is strictly to do with the "Highlight and locate matched words within PDF document viewer" option ONLY.

As you have noted, Zoom actually performs wildcard searching (or partial word matching) within PDF documents fine. That is why you see it correctly returned in the list of results when you search for "blue*" and the document contains "bluebird".

The problem you describe is limited to Acrobat Reader's inability to perform substring matching or match wildcards. This is explained in the Help file and Users Guide section relating to this feature:

Highlight and locate within PDF documents (PDF only)
This feature will allow searched words to appear highlighted within Acrobat Reader when you click on a PDF document in the list of search results. Acrobat Reader will also scroll and locate the first occurrence of the word. This feature will only work for Acrobat Reader 7.0 or later.

Note that this feature is dependent on the capabilities of the Acrobat Reader application which does not currently support exact phrase matching and substring matching. This means that it may highlight some words which were not the ones specifically found or matched by Zoom in such cases.

You can disable this option if it is a problem for you. But the feature is limited to what Acrobat Reader is capable of.