Linguistics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am new to Stack Exchange, so if this question fits better on another board, please let me know.
I am looking for Windows-compatible software that will create a concordance from .pdf and .txt files. Ideally it would work with languages that have diacritical marks (Spanish, French) in addition to English. Is anyone aware of a program that can do this?
I have searched online already and have so far only been able to find old software whose sites no longer work very well.
Thanks!
The probably most widely used concordance software is Laurence Anthony's AntConc. It has a range of functions beyond producing concordances, such as determining word counts and collocations. It can also handle regular expressions. AntConc is free and runs on a number of different platforms. I regularly recommend it to students, use it in teaching, and know many colleagues who do. This may be subjective, but I think AntConc is (together with WordSmith, which is not free) widely accepted as a standard tool in corpus linguistics.
AntConc cannot handle pdf files. You can use the AntFileConverter (scroll down on the website) to convert your files from pdf to txt. Note that how well this works may vary depending on the pdf files - there might be issues with special characters.
