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The SWISH-E README File


Table of Contents:

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What is SWISH-E?

SWISH-E is Simple Web Indexing System for Humans - Enhanced. SWISH-E can quickly and easily index directories of files or remote web sites and search the generated indexes.

SWISH was created by Kevin Hughes to fill the need of the growing number of Web administrators on the Internet - many of the indexing systems were not well documented, were hard to use and install, and were too complex for their own good. The system was widely used for several years, long enough to collect some bug fixes and requests for enhancements.

In Fall 1996, The Library of UC Berkeley received permission from Kevin Hughes to implement bug fixes and enhancements to the original binary. The result is SWISH-Enhanced or SWISH-E, brought to you by the SWISH-E Development Team.

SWISH-E version 2.2 represents a major rewrite of the code and the addition of many new features. Memory requirements for indexing have been reduced, and indexing speed is much improved. New features allow more control over indexing, better document parsing, improved indexing and searching logic, better filter code, and the ability to index from any data source.

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Key features

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Where do I get SWISH-E?

The current version of SWISH-E can be found at:

http://swish-e.org

Please make sure you use a current version of swish-e.

Information about Windows binary distributions can also be found at this site.

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How Do I Install Swish?

Read the INSTALL page. Information on specific ports (VMS and Win32) can be found in sub-directories of the src directory.

The Windows binary can be found in the src/win32 directory.

In addition to the INSTALL page, make sure you read the SWISH-FAQ page if you have any questions, or to get an idea of questions that you might someday ask.

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The SWISH-E Documentation

Documetation is provided in the SWISH-E distribution package in two forms, POD (Plain Old Documentation), and in html format. The POD documentation is in the pod directory, and the HTML documentation is in the html directory, of course.

If your system includes the required support files and programs, the distribution make files can also generate the documentation in these formats:

 
    Postscript
    PDF (Adobe Acrobat)
    system man pages

You may also build a ``split'' version of the documentation where each topic heading is a separate web page. Building the split version also creates a SWISH-E index of the documentation that makes the documentation searchable via the included Perl CGI program.

Buiding these other forms of documentation require aditional helper applications -- most modern Linux distributions will include all that's needed. At least mine does... You shouldn't have a problem if you have kept your perl and perl libraries up to date.

Online documentation can be found at the SWISH-E web site listed above.

See INSTALL for information on creating the PDF and Postscript versions of the documentation, and for information on installing the SWISH-* documentation as Unix man(1) pages.

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How do I read the SWISH-E documentation?

The SWISH-E documentation included with the SWISH-E distribution is in POD and HTML formats. The POD documentation can be found in the pod directory, and the HTML documentation can be found in the html directory.

To view the HTML documentation point your browser to the html/index.html file.

The POD documentation is displayed by the ``perldoc'' command that is included with every Perl installation. For example, to view the swish-e installation documentation page called ``INSTALL'', type

 
   perldoc pod/INSTALL

or to make life easier,

 
   cd pod
   perldoc INSTALL
   perldoc SWISH-RUN

Complain to your system administrator if the perldoc command is not available on your machine.

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Included Documentation

The following documentation is included in this SWISH-E distribution:

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Document Generation

The SWISH-E documentation in HTML format was created with Pod::HtmlPsPdf, a package of Perl modules written and/or modified by Stas Bekman to automate the conversion of documents in pod format (see perldoc perlpod) to HTML, Postscript, and PDF. A slightly modified version of this package is include with the SWISH-E distribution and used for building the HTML. As distributed, SWISH-E contains only the pod and HTML documentation. See INSTALL for instructions on creating man(1), Postscript, and PFD formats.

Thanks, Stas, for your help!

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What's included in the SWISH-E distribution?

Here's an overview of the directories included in the swish-e distribution:

conf/

Example swish-e configuration setups to help you get started. In the stopwords sub-directory are a number of stopword files for different languages.

doc/

Contains files required for building the HTML, PDF, and Postscript documentation.

example/

This contains a sample CGI front-end for running swish-e.

filter-bin/

Sample programs to use with swish-e's ``filters''. Examples include PDF, MS Word, and binary strings filters.

html/

The documentation in HTML format.

perl/

The perl interface to the swish-e C library.

pod/

The documentation in perldoc (pod) format.

prog-bin/

Example programs and modules to use with the ``prog'' document source access method. Examples include a web spider, and a program to filter pdf and MS word documents.

src/

This directory contains the source code for swish-e. OS-specific directories are also found here.

tests/

The documents used for running make test.

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Where do I get help with SWISH-E?

If you need help with installing or using SWISH-E please subscribe to the SWISH-E mailing list. See visit the SWISH-E web site listed above for information on subscribing to the SWISH-E list.

Before posting any questions please read QUESTIONS AND TROUBLESHOOTING in the INSTALL documentation page.

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Speling mistakes

Please contact the SWISH-E list with corrections to this documentation. Any help in cleaning up the docs will be appreciated!

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SWISH-E Development

SWISH-E is currently being developed as an open source project on SourceForge http://sourceforge.net.

Contact the SWISH-E list for questions.

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Document Info

Each document in the SWISH-E distribution contains this section. It refers only to the specific page it's located in, and not to the SWISH-E program or the documentation as a whole.

$Id: README.pod,v 1.8 2001/09/29 15:38:54 whmoseley Exp $

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