The way you can start the TIGERSearch tool depends on your operating system. On Windows machines, a program group called TIGERSearch has been created during the installation - so you just have to select the TIGERSearch program in the start menu.
On Unix machines, symbolic links have been created. If your general path is set properly, you may just need to type in TIGERSearch. However, the TIGERSearch start program can always be found in the TIGERSearch installation path:
INSTALLATIONPATH/bin/TIGERSearch
Please note: Any relative path specified in a dialog window is evaluated
with regard to the so-called working directory. On Unix machines
this directory is defined as the TIGERSearch starting directory
(i.e. the directory TIGERSearch has been started from). On Mac
and Windows machines the working directory is defined as the
user's home directory.
When you start the TIGERSearch tool, the TIGERSearch main window pops up (cf. screenshot). Position and size of the window are saved when leaving the tool, so the arrangement of your windows will be restored in the next TIGERSearch session.
Figure: TIGERSearch main window
The main window of TIGERSearch ist divided into two parts. On the left you find the so-called information panel. It comprises a list of all corpora (cf. subsection 2.1), some special information about the currently loaded corpus (cf. subsection 2.2, subsection 2.3 and subsection 2.4), and the user's bookmarks (cf. subsection 3.4). On the right there is the query input area which consists of a textual and a graphical query editor (cf. section 3 and section 4, respectively).
The TIGERSearch User's Manual can be accessed directly within the TIGERSearch user interface. The TIGERSearch help window can be activated by pressing the Help button in the upper toolbar or selecting one of the items in the Help menu.
Figure: The TIGERSearch help window
The help window is divided into two parts: On the left there is the manual navigation area. Here you find a table of contents, an index, and a search engine. Just browse through the table of contents or through the index and click on the topic you are interested in:
Figure: Navigating through the manual
If you are looking for a special topic which you cannot find in the table of contents or in the index, you might use the search engine. Just type in your search item(s) and the search engine finds all topics in which one of the items is used:
Figure: The help window search engine
The help window toolbar comprises the following buttons: The Navigation button lets you hide/show the navigation bar. The Back and Forward buttons let you navigate through the topics you have viewed before. The Refresh button reloads a topic, and the Close button closes the help window.
Corpus queries are displayed as green-colored hyperlinks. If you click on a query hyperlink, the query text is automatically copied into the query text editor of the TIGERSearch main application.