Using Doc4TF

Since Doc4TF is implemented as a Jupyter notebook, you will need an environment capable of running Jupyter notebooks. As this tool is intended to be used alongside Text-Fabric, it’s likely that you have already set up such an environment. If you haven’t done so yet, a good option is to install Anaconda. Text-Fabric requires at least Python version 3.7.0, so any Anaconda Navigator from version 5.3.0 (Sept 28, 2018) upwards, would suffice.

Note that Your environment should (for obvious reasons) include the Python package Text-Fabric. If not installed yet, it can be installed using pip. More details on installing the Text-Fabric package can be found in tf.about.install.

To start using Doc4TF, you first need to download this Jupyter Notebook file and place it anywhere on your system where you can execute it. The notebook will guide you through the process, which basically consists of the following steps::

• Load the Text-Fabric database you specify.
• Execute the code pressent in the subsequent cells. The code will:
  • Construct a python dictionary with relevant data from the TF datase.
  • Create separate files for each feature.
  • Create index pages.

The output of the tool consists of a set of markdown which is the standard file format used for regular Text-Fabric feature documentation. To browse these files using a standard web browser, they need to undergo post-processing. One method is to transfer the files to a GitHub repository, which allows any browser to view the post-processed files. It is also possible to browse markdown files directly in your browser after installing a browser extension like markdown viewer. The script can also create a set of HTML files that can be stored on a local drive and browsed using any webbrowser.

An example documentation set created by this script is found at the results directory.