INTRODUCTION

Hi and welcome to all!

I've created this blog to address problems and issues raised by users of the VisualText programming and development environment. The software, as well as prebuilt text analyzers, is available at http://www.textanalysis.com for free (non-commercial) download and use.

One user spent two weeks trying to get a compiled and standalone text analyzer working, before working out the issues in a few phone calls with me.

Initially I'll discuss various aspects of getting started with VisualText and with the NLP++ language. Tutorials within the Help menu of the product provide a good basic introduction to building programs within the tool. Not as well document is how to run text analyzers outside the VisualText environment.

It's my hope to make VisualText and NLP++ open source and free within a few years, so that a broad spectrum of programmers will have access to its strengths as a rapid prototyping tool for web crawlers, HTML/XML analyzers, information extraction systems, and much more.