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 | What is Abstracter? |
 | Abstracter is a contextual menu plug-in that summarizes text to the clipboard or a text file. |
| Why use Abstracter? |
| While OS X (10.3) has a built in summary service (see the Services menu under the Apple menu), it only works with COCOA based applications such as TextEdit or Apple Mail. Abstracter is designed to provide a similar summary service for all Carbon and Cocoa applications under OS X (10.3. or greater). |
| Does Abstracter speak my language? |
| Abstracter can summarize text in the following nine languages: |
| i) English ii) French iii) German iv) Spanish v) Italian vi) Japanese vii) Dutch viii) Danish ix) Swedish |
| Abstracter's interface is localized for each of these languages. The interface will automatically change to match the System Preference's default start-up language after restarting your Macintosh. |
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How do I install Abstracter? |
| 1) Double click the Abstracter CM Installer and the Abstracter CM will be automatically installed in the correct location on your hard disk. |
| 2) Manually install the Abstracter CM by creating a new folder inside the Library folder called 'Contextual Menu Items' if it does not already exist and drag the Abstracter CM into that folder. |
| In both cases above, you will have to either Log Out and Log In again or restart your Macintosh to load the Abstracter CM. |
| How do I use Abstracter? |
| An example of how Abstracter summarizes text can be seen in the following tutorial: |
| 1) Launch Internet Explorer and go to your favorite news service such as CNN.com or Reuters.com. |
| 2) Click on a story headline to open the story in Explorer. |
| 3) Once the story is displayed in the Explorer window, use the Select All (Command + A) to select all text in the story. |
| 4) With the story selected, hold the control key down and click on the selected text in the Explorer window. |
| 5) A contextual menu like the one below appears: |
| 6) Select the Summarize 'To Clipboard' menu command to send the summary to the clipboard. |
| 7) Choose the 'Show Clipboard' command from the Finder's Edit menu to view the summary. If you leave the clipboard window open and return to Explorer to do another summary, the Clipboard window will be automatically opened as the topmost window the next time you do a summary. You may also store the Clipboard window in the Dock by clicking on the Minimize icon (middle icon in the top left corner of a Macintosh window with a '-' icon to easily view the updated clipboard contents at any time. |
| 8) You can also save a summary as a text file by using the Save As command in the Abstracter menu. Summaries may be saved as: |
| 9) To control the length of the summary (1-10 sentences), choose the Summary Level command from the Abstracter CM menu. |
| Summarization: An overview |
| The quality of Abstracter's summarization is dependent upon three factors. |
| 1) First, if you try to summarize narrative prose (journal/weblog writing) or a mixture of narrative and expository prose, you will probably end up with a less than satisfactory summary of the content. On the other hand , if you are working with expository prose as usually found in newspaper writing, then the topic hierarchy should result in a well formed summary. |
| 2) Secondly, the length of writing is directly correlated to the accuracy of the summary: the longer the piece, the harder it is to isolate the main topic structure. Generally Abstracter works well up to approximately 3-5 pages of expository prose. |
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3) Finally, the formatting of the actual document is crucial since the text selection must be well-formed and not interspersed with formatting characters (i.e. html tags etc). Abstracter has a built in filter to remove extraneous html formatting, but with the recent proliferation of inline graphics and pop-up ads, this filter function is sometimes fooled into thinking html formatting tags are part of the body text. If you encounter extraneous characters or html tags in a summary, use the mouse to select the actual text to summarize rather than simply using the Select All command. |
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