weft qda users - Nov 2007 - [Weft QDA users] Weft Feature Requests and Bug Report.

Dear Weft Users,

After a day or so having upgraded from NVivo 2 to Nvivo 7 I got fed up
with various things, mainly feature bloat, and the apparent lack of
anything resembling the old speed coder. In a fit of pique, I have
installed Weft QDA and am now quite myself again. Nice package! More
than anything, it feels just right. I have been using it for about a
day, now, although I used it for teaching in the past (I don''t believe
in demonstrating to students software that is too expensive for me to
expect them to install on their own computers). 

I gather that the philosophy behind Weft is to keep it''s features pared
down to the bare bones, but the addition of the following would be
really helpful and would, with one exception, not compromise on this
philosophy.

1. Make texts editable within the document text window. This would be
nice for a number of reasons, not least of which because the text
importer is not perfect. 

2. Enable hyperlinking between documents would be nice. This is the one
feature that might compromise a little on the ''back to basics''
philosophy of Weft.

3. Enable auto-save (especially important in light of the bug no. 1
reported below).

4. Enable expanding of the area to be marked/coded using Crl and arrow
keys.

5. Enable cut, copy and paste from documents and from categories.

6. It would be nice (really nice) if the review coding view could be
exported as a .csv or similar. 

I see from Alex''s website that a version 2 is due real soon now. It may
be that some or all of the issues listed below will be taken care of in
this new release. I also know that Alex doesn''t have unlimited time to
devote to this project. I am posting these mainly in the hope that they
will be of some use to Alex and any other developers. 

Now, the following bugs. I installed the latest Weft onto Ubuntu (Gutsy
Gibbon), which I am running as a virtual machine using VMWare Server. 

1. Re-naming a node caused Weft to crash. 

2. Importing documents from .pdf produced blank documents! I had
converted the document to .pdf myself, and there was no security
restrictions on them. 

Best wishes (and thanks for a really usable programme). 

Lindsay Stirton 



========================================================================Dr
Lindsay Stirton              lindsay.stirton at manchester.ac.uk
Department of Law               T 0161 275 3584  +44 161 275 3584
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL

United Kingdom
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Hello everybody,

I still use ubuntu to (Feisty) and I can confirm the instability for some
fonctions when I use it with wine emulator.

The modification proposed by Lindsay can help a lot whent teaching using
Weft in qualitative data analysis with master students (many prefere to use
NVivo because of the number of fonctions).

I can report an other problem I receive yesterday from a student. We use
Weft to codify interview realised in french (from Qu?bec/Canada) and she got
a problem with the specific accents (?, ?, ?, ?, etc.). I found a basic
solution just by changing the font style in Weft QDA (Times New Roman seems
to do the job). That was a similarly solution I found when using NVivo 2.
Mabe it could be a good idea to identify all the font a user can choose to
view the french caracteres.

But this problems give me an idea. Did it can be an idea to develop a wiki
or something like that to propose an active documentation, open for
modifications?

Have a good day

Jean-Fran?ois Dragon
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Hi all,

Just to clarify (following Grizzou''s post). I am not using the Weft for
Windows. Rather, I followed Christophe Lejeune''s instructions for
building Weft on Debian (and can confirm these work fine on Ubuntu).
 

Lindsay Stirton 



========================================================================Dr
Lindsay Stirton              lindsay.stirton at manchester.ac.uk
Department of Law               T 0161 275 3584  +44 161 275 3584
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL

United Kingdom
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Hi Lindsay

Sorry for the delay in replying - I''ve been away and not on email.

Lindsay Stirton (Dr) wrote:
> After a day or so having upgraded from NVivo 2 to Nvivo 7 I got fed up
> with various things, mainly feature bloat, and the apparent lack of
> anything resembling the old speed coder. In a fit of pique, I have
> installed Weft QDA and am now quite myself again. Nice package! 
>   
Thank you for your kind words. Most of the specific features you mention 
I think are available in version 1, or are already implemented in the 
development version.
> 1. Make texts editable within the document text window. This would be
> nice for a number of reasons, not least of which because the text
> importer is not perfect. 
>   
This is currently implemented in version 2. In the document window 
you''ll be able to switch between an "editing" and a
"coding" view.
Existing coding is maintained.
> 2. Enable hyperlinking between documents would be nice. This is the one
> feature that might compromise a little on the ''back to
basics''
> philosophy of Weft.
>   
Version 2 currently allows standalone "notes" to be applied to bits of
text, but there isn''t a hyperlinking facility. I think I''d
worry that
having "coding", "annotating" and "hyperlinking"
all together might make
things a bit confusing in their similarity. But I''m open to suggestions
- this will be easier when I have a chance to tidy up and release a 
draft version 2.
> 3. Enable auto-save (especially important in light of the bug no. 1
> reported below).
>   
Again, done in version 2 already.
> 4. Enable expanding of the area to be marked/coded using Crl and arrow
> keys.
>   
Nice idea, will look into this.
> 5. Enable cut, copy and paste from documents and from categories.
>   
This should work already (it does on Windows, anyway - but I don''t have
a version 1 set up on Linux to test).
> 6. It would be nice (really nice) if the review coding view could be
> exported as a .csv or similar. 
>   
Again, this should already be possible. Have the Code Review window 
active, then choose "Export" and you should get a CSV
option.
> I see from Alex''s website that a version 2 is due real soon now.
It may
> be that some or all of the issues listed below will be taken care of in
> this new release. I also know that Alex doesn''t have unlimited
time to
> devote to this project. I am posting these mainly in the hope that they
> will be of some use to Alex and any other developers. 
>   
Thanks, it''s appreciated. I made a lot of progress and most of the new 
features I and others want are in there, but it needs some tidying up, 
and I''m also waiting for the release of Ruby version 2.0 at the end of 
the month which will make Weft faster and working with multilingual 
documents much slicker.

Unfortunately I''ve been swamped with other research work over the past 
month or two and this may not let up for a little while
yet.
> Now, the following bugs. I installed the latest Weft onto Ubuntu (Gutsy
> Gibbon), which I am running as a virtual machine using VMWare Server. 
>
> 1. Re-naming a node caused Weft to crash. 
>   
OK, I''m afraid I don''t have a version 1.0 set up on Linux to
test this.
> 2. Importing documents from .pdf produced blank documents! I had
> converted the document to .pdf myself, and there was no security
> restrictions on them.
>   
Direct PDF importing is going to be dropped in version 2.0 anyway. The 
reason for its inclusion in v1 was that major PDF apps (eg Acrobat 
Reader) didn''t support export to text, whereas they do now. So it
should
be easy to use, for example, XPDF on Linux to produce an importable text 
file.

Thanks again for your comments.
Alex

grizzou wrote:
> I can report an other problem I receive yesterday from a student. We 
> use Weft to codify interview realised in french (from Qu?bec/Canada) 
> and she got a problem with the specific accents (?, ?, ?, ?, etc.). I 
> found a basic solution just by changing the font style in Weft QDA 
> (Times New Roman seems to do the job). That was a similarly solution I 
> found when using NVivo 2. Mabe it could be a good idea to identify all 
> the font a user can choose to view the french caracteres.
Thanks for the report; I''ll have a look into
this.
> But this problems give me an idea. Did it can be an idea to develop a 
> wiki or something like that to propose an active documentation, open 
> for modifications?
That is a nice idea. Rubyforge (a site which supports Weft''s 
development) allows a Wiki, so I will see if it''s possible to put an 
annotatable version of the docs on there.

Best
Alex