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).