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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!

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  • Are you ready to buy the software? Will free software in Russian do for you? – Yellow Sky Oct 30 '14 at 13:19
  • There's an online service wordcounter.com – Yellow Sky Oct 30 '14 at 13:42
  • I'd be willing to buy if I didn't have to sell my car to get the software :). I will check out the Russian software. The wordcounter site is useful, and is a good start for what I'd like to do. – twoblackboxes Oct 30 '14 at 15:31
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    This is a practical question about (corpus) linguistic analysis, which makes it perfectly on topic on SE Linguistics. Also, from a practical point of view, people on Software Recommendations are not particularly likely to be able to provide a good answer. – robert Oct 31 '14 at 18:34
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it should be migrated to Software Recommendations. – curiousdannii Mar 10 '15 at 7:38
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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.

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  • This is very useful. I'm sorry I'm so tardy in responding! – twoblackboxes Nov 25 '14 at 17:05

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