Building on FoxTrot Pro’s strength as both a day-to-day indexer and a tool for project-oriented work, we’re pleased to introduce Compendium.
While Version 8.0 focused on reducing the number of unique index files (notably through Foxtrot Duplicate Search), Compendium addresses another longstanding need: quickly gathering excerpts from multiple documents into a single, cohesive report.
Why Compendium?
Historically, creating a project-specific report meant running a search, previewing results, then copying and pasting excerpts into a separate text editor or word processor. Compendium streamlines that workflow by letting you automatically collect relevant content as you browse search results. No more juggling multiple windows, and no more manual copy-paste.
How it works (optional) create a focused Index: Many users begin with an ad hoc index of folders most likely to contain relevant information. This step is especially useful for Compendium, ensuring fewer, more accurate search hits. Search and select: Perform your searches as usual. Whenever you find a document with content worth highlighting, choose “Add to Compendium.” Review your report: After adding several documents, open the Compendium window to preview your aggregated results. Refine as needed: A set of straightforward toggles lets you customize how your final report appears. You can also include or exclude entire documents with a click.
Export and persistence Flexible export options: When you’re satisfied with your curated excerpts, copy the styled text or export it to a variety of formats. Persistent workflows: Compendium saves your progress, so you can quit FoxTrot and pick up where you left off at any time. Once your project is complete, simply delete or archive the Compendium.
Since its 2005 launch, FoxTrot’s design has focused on precision searching and making the number of results manageable.
One way to achieve this is to search, by default, for full words and suggest moderate usage of wildcards.
Another contributor is to offer multiple additive categorizations, in order to focus the user’s attention on a manageable and plausible number of hits.
Our work with customers and surveys has now prioritized reducing the number of duplicate and similar files before indexing. To this end, we are introducing a clean-sheet approach to duplicate identification and elimination.
Duplicate apps are a dime a dozen, and some obviously have pretty good features. But we think none are as comprehensive to iteratively sanitize an indexable data universe before using FoxTrot Pro - hence FoxTrot Duplicate Search’s unique features:
- Four methods to identify duplicates:
- filename (with or without extension)
- content
- duration, for time-based media such as video and audio
- a list of Spotlight attributes
- A dual list allowing display of all suspected duplicates on top and all variants of the selected duplicate on the bottom
- Direct actions such as Move to Bin, Delete immediately, Open in source application, Quick Look, etc…
- Powerful actions for batch selection by a number of criteria
- FoxTrot Pro action menu item to search for duplicate files among selected documents
PDF OCR: Scanned PDF documents can now be processed for Optical Character Recognition on macOS 13 Ventura or later to index their textual content.
Images OCR: Scanned image files (.jpg, .png etc) can now be converted to PDF documents and processed for Optical Character Recognition on macOS 13 Ventura or later to index their textual content.
You can now search for some Spotlight attributes that do not have a display name or description, and you can even manually add attributes that have not been declared by any application.
Added support for “logical size” and “text content length” when filtering by Spotlight attribute.
Restore last used values when adding or toggling search criteria.
Added “Did you know” tips window.
Added “Open with…” contextual menu item, to open a found file using a specific application.
Improved thumbnail generation speed in Thumbnails View mode.