Lesson 6: Linking and organizing primary-text

There are several ways to link those data to a HU:

1. The files are dragged one by one from the Windows Explorer into the text-window of the ATLAS main window by way of drag&drop (they are then visible as well as linked) or are dragged into the primary list-window (on the upper left). In that case, they are not displayed immediately but they are however linked to the HU.
2. The same is achieved by selecting the „assign" menu-item from the "Documents"-menu (or by clicking the button on the main bar respectively) and selecting and confirming the appropriate files from the File-manager that pops up. (Dealing with graphics- and audio-files is not discussed in greater detail. The basic procedure is the same.)

All text-files must comply with the ANSI or OEM character-set conventions. As a consequence, you may not use fully formatted texts from word processing applications such as WinWord or WordPerfect. Nevertheless you may encounter texts that have been saved as „DOS-text" within WORD, appear gibberish (vowel mutations like ‚ß‘ are displayed incorrectly). This indicates that you have chosen the wrong text-filter in the configuration dialog. You have two options to correct that effect:

1. for a particular text: display text, open the context-menu in the primary-text list-window!), select the "Set Encoding" option from the "Miscellaneous" menu-item and toggle from OEM to ANSI or vice versa, depending on the settings.

2. Alternatively, you may alter the default-settings for all text-files by choosing the appropriate option in the „General" tab in the configuration-menu (check or uncheck "use ANSI"). This will also allow you to change the graphics- and audio-formats for a particular primary-document.

Changing the internal and external names of primary documents: Now and then during your work, you might encounter that the originally chosen filename needs to be changed. For example the name might not be expressive enough for an analytical work or files with the same name from different computers were linked to the HU. This makes it hard to determine the original purpose of a file. In that case you may consider the two following options:

Renaming the file (outside of ATLAS/ti)

The major drawback is that the renamed file must be newly linked to the project since ATLAS is by default searching for the file with the old name. It is especially annoying if you have previously worked with that file (created quotations and codes). This work would be entirely lost since the HU-file stores all operations as a pointer rather than the storing the code itself. However since build 50 (an interim-release as of June 1997) of version 4.0, the application now prompts you to confirm using the newly named file instead of the old file as a PD when using „Save as".

Changing the internal HU-naming of the particular PD-file.

ATLAS/ti differentiates between internal and external filenames as with HU‘s while both are initially identical. As soon as you have changed the internal name of the active text-file through the primary-text list-menu, both names are from then on administered separately. This also imposes the following disadvantage: After a while you will hardly be able to memorize the external filenames of an internal file. But you might want to consider administering the file by its PD-NR since it is possible to change the external filename.

The PD‘s are initially inserted into the order of the list wherefore they are bound to a HU. This is useful whenever the order is used to reflect the history of binding texts. However often you might want to apply a different sort-criteria such as to present the timely order of the data-acquisition or the event-history in an alphabetical order. For this purpose you can change the sort-criteria in the context-menu (set sort options) and for example specify an alphabetical sort-order. It will allow you to quickly and flexibly change the form of presentation of the list. Now and then you might not only want to change the presentation of texts in the lists but also their order respectively and as a result assign different PD-numbers to them. This is achieved by again changing the order of the active PD through the primary-text list-menu ("miscellaneous/change position"). Now you need to specify the number of the PD where to insert the active PD. An even simpler approach is to select the desired text in the primary-text list-window and drag it to a new location while keeping the left mouse button pressed. (You can also change the path of the primary-document file (context-menu function "change path") in case you need to re-organize your files or work on a different computer with a different directory-structure.)

The problem about editing primary-documents

Often the question arises if it is still possible to edit data-texts after they have been bound to a HU as a PD (for example if you discovered typos or inconsistent alias-names or even that names have not been anonymized yet). It is technically no problem within ATLAS/ti: load text into a PD-window, activate the context-menu ("Edit mode") and start to make your changes. While doing so you need to regard an important limitation related to the logical concept of ATLAS/ti: Quotations within a PD are treated and stored as column- and row numbers within a HU. If you insert or delete text before the last passage marked as a quotation in the PD it will cause the column- and row reference to get out of place so that the quotation-boundaries are now incorrectly. However you won't encounter problems when making changes within a column as long as you are not enforcing an additional line-break. If there is a quotation in the same column you might encounter that its borders are displaced.