Has anyone created a consolidated simple index/list of PDF locations, in a relatively current iteration of The Cyc?

[pixelpedant]

I’ve been noting their locations (i.e., “\vendors\archard\thorn\thorn.pdf” or what have you) down piecemeal in spreadsheets where I keep track of other things TI-99, and I just had to suspect someone has already done this sort of thing in a more consolidated fashion at some point. 

[blackbox]

Consolidated- see the cyc.pdf in the cyc directory, over 8000 pages of index.

I found the thorn.pdf referenced  in there fairly quickly using FIND with my pdf viewer and the cyc.pdf gives the full path to the document.

Simple: articles 140 pdfs  Books 49 pdfs  Pubs 149 pdfs  Usrgroup 242 pdfs  Vendors 1216 pdfs

Not very many? Ah- but the magazines have a years worth in a single pdf! On the other hand in vendors each software title manual has its own pdf. Pretty well all of the PDFs are text searchable too, using your PDF viewer..

I'm not sure what you are looking for- there is just so much data in there, simple probably won't work too well.  Perhaps the 8000++ page index is overwhelming, but you can always search.

You may even find your computer's "find in file" utility of use.

good reading....  s
 

[pixelpedant]

Indeed, the issue I'm addressing and attempting to find a solution to at least for my own convenience is that cyc.pdf is not an efficient/convenient/consistent means by which to directly access and/or locate individual files on an as-needed or ready reference basis, and I likewise do not have a sufficiently rapid or systematic means of acquiring and referencing document locations in my own documents, consequently. 

It’s a vast, crossreferenced knowledge compendium rather than a hotlinked file index.  And even as an old fashioned crossreferenced knowledge compendium, it is unusual for its lack of a headword index, or any systematic means of searching for or navigating to a headword.  

So as worthwhile as it is as a knowledge compendium, specifically as a means of addressing the desire to, say, open the Tris manual or to identify its location, it can be spectacularly inefficient.  In that searching for “Tris” (or “Parsec” or whatever common phrase) in the text as a whole will produce far too many false positives and crossreferences, and locating the “Tris” headword itself by manual navigation will lead to a crossreference (Asgard Software), which, if one navigates to Asgard Software, and navigates to the relevant subarticle (Tris), will provide the manual location within it.  

What I’m now doing, consequently, is assembling a hotlinked (local relative file:./ links) named list of manual files, so I’ve got a page sitting in the Cyc directory which is just a list of 800 or so vendor manual titles of the form Vendor - Product as direct, functioning links, which can be traversed and searched much more rapidly and selectively, than cyc.pdf can.  And I’ll share that HTML file here when I’m done, in case it’s useful to anyone else in this capacity.  I’m not bothering with ads, periodicals, letters and ephemera, since it does make sense to access these (i.e., in a research capacity) in exactly the way the Cyc provides for.  It’s only in a ready reference and file access capacity, especially where software and hardware manuals are concerned, that it seems to me one might want something much more direct and concise. 

 

[pixelpedant]

So here's that (or a preliminary version of it), in case anyone wants it.  It's just a relatively linked HTML list of just over 800 documents which aren't ads, catalogues, letters, or ephemera (and which are therefore almost all manuals) in the Cyc's /vendors/ directory, listed by the expanded name of the vendor whose directory they are listed under (which is not necessarily the developer) and product name as listed within. 

 

So if you put that in the /cyc/ directory, it's basically just a bookmark file with relative links for the content under all subdirectories of /vendors/.  Naturally, older versions of the Cyc might produce link/content inconsistencies. 

 

Mainly, I just wanted a way to very quickly pull up a single page, CTRL+F for "4A Flyer" (or whatever) and click to view the manual right away, when I already know what I'm looking for.  And while there are some great (free!) manual sources now, on the web, the Cyc is still the most comprehensive. 

 

For any actual research and reference to more varied sources, obviously, cyc.pdf itself is the resource.  But I like the idea of having a quick-reference file list.  Messily assembled as this one might be. 

mylist.html

[blackbox]

Good idea- here is a slight modification - for maximum cross platform use it is modified to be placed in the VENDORS folder.

Added an option to view sorted by program name or vendor name.

I may have added the odd error!

Correction to the first listing above- amend the entry for PARSEC language variations (done in the attached).

regards  s
 

mylist2.html

[pixelpedant]

I took this one step further as for some reason I couldn't leave well enough alone here, so here now is a version with some categorisation, category based selection/exclusion, and sortable columns (sortable by clicking column headers).  Will still run locally out of the /cyc/ directory via any modern web browser, but uses embedded Javascript/jQuery for the interactive stuff (sorting, collapsing table content). 

 

 

 

sortable-categories.html