After some very intensive use of the information I have
been squirreling away
in an askSam database, I have the following items for the
wish-list:


Item One:

I have summarized circa 8,000 historical documents in a
4.5MB database
(.ask file only - .idx and dta files are extra.) It is
convenient to access this
information in various ways *concurrently* -
chronologically, and by subject/search string.
But in version 3 I can only access one sort of search at a
time. Ideally, I
would like to have two asksam screens, accessing the same
information AT THE SAME TIME.

Currently the only way I know of doing this is by printing
out a full document Report sorted
chronologically, and, with the printout at my side, doing a
subject/keyword search on the screen.
By not including in the report layout any superfluous
information, by using small fonts sizes, multiple records
on one page,
and only one line between records, this task uses only
about 2,500 pages ..... Entire forests in Sweden groan.
Besides, as soon as I add more material (a daily occurence)
the printout is outdated.

I can think of two ways around this problem of access to
large amounts of information:

A. - two adjacent asksam windows displaying different
information from the same database
B. - the ability to export a Report to a PDF (Adobe
Acrobat) format, with all the bold and italics of the
report layout
retained in the PDF. I can use Acrobat to scroll through
the PDF file while using my askSam window to access
the information in other ways. And I can produce a new PDF
file each time I need to generate a new Report.

[NB: this is different from the second window with snippets
of retrieved records that Version 4 has - and of which I am
a huge fan.]

Item Two:

I would like to be able to color-code information - much
the same as using marker pens of different colors on the
printout.
Its like tagging multiple records - with tags of different
colors.
One can use different color fonts in Word97, so Windows
must support this ability.



Ron Zweig