I posted updates that spanned all versions of MarcEdit yesterday. The updates were primary based around the thoughts I’ve been having around unicode normalizations, and a need to provide a way to formalized and standardized normalizations across records.
Unicode Normalizations
In all versions of MarcEdit, there is a new settings in the preferences window:
When the option, Enforce Defined Normalization is selected, the tool will ensure all input and output created through the MarcEditor and MarcEngine conform to the normalization selected. This will allow users to find and replace data without need to worry about normalization, and will ensure that the data that comes out of MarcEdit all complies to a specific normalization when working with UTF8 data.
Executable tasks
I had a question asking if MarcEdit’s Tasks could be created as executable files (like scripts). The answer is kind of. I’ve added a new option to the tool — in the MarcEdit Task Manager — you can select a task for export and now select: Task Executable (*.exe)
What this will do is allow you to create an new program that wraps execution of the task into it. Now, this doesn’t make the task portable or a stand alone file. The executable assumes MarcEdit is installed, and the task lives in your task store — But this gives you a shortcut of sorts that can be used to just drag and drop records for processing. On the desktop, your new executable task will look like:
And you can drag files to process onto the icon. The program will run the task, outputting the new file as the same file name as processed, with the addition of .rev.[extension] added to it.
This is still slightly a concept — you may find your mileage will vary with it. But if you try it, let me know how it goes.
–tr