Managing transcripts, depositions and text

Overview

MasterFile manages logical documents rather than pages. Text is extracted from all documents, including email, and presented uniformly in the 'OCR / Transcript / Full Text of Document / Case or Issue Argument' section of a document's profile. Since affidavits, depositions or transcripts often run tens if not hundreds of pages long, managing key extracts of document text is critical. This article explains the tools MasterFile gives you.

Extracts

Extracts are one of MasterFile's most powerful features for breaking down large documents.

Creating an extract from a piece of text is as simple as highlighting the text and clicking on 'Make Extract' at the top of the profile form.

Once you've made an extract you can create doc-links that refer to it in other document profiles, fact profiles, and even within deposition text itself. These doc-links can either be in the same or other profiles, for example to refer back to contradictory statements you've uncovered. Doc-links to extracts, like any other doc-link, can be e-mailed to other team members.

Extracts can be assigned reminder tasks, linked to issues, players or topics. All notes and thoughts about the extract you enter in the profile will be full text indexed so even if you can't remember which extract you want, search for the few words you remember and you'll find it again.

See Creating extracts.

See also Creating facts and chronological events.

Highlighting

Text can also be highlighted by selecting it in edit mode, right clicking and choosing 'Text Properties' which displays a persistent property box so you can continuously markup text.

Sections

Often large sections of a document such as a deposition transcript are not relevant and would be best left hidden until needed. You can collapse extraneous material it into a section with your own title, just like sections of profiles themselves. Searching its view or within its profile will still any highlight matches.

try it
  1. Hit Enter in front of the line numbers at the start and end of the section.
  2. Paint it as above.
  3. Click Section from the Create menu as shown.

The collapsed section hides any irrelevant content.

  • The title shown is taken by default from the selection's first line. Right click on it to edit or type a new summary of your own.
  • To delete the section, right click on it and choose 'Remove Section' The text is restored in-line as it was. You can delete blank lines around it, if any.
OCR/Transcript pagination style

In most cases, pagination and numbering is controlled by the Watch Folder, Email Loader or Express Load with

  • no line numbering,
  • sequential line numbering for the whole file, without pagination, or
  • automatic page and line numbers taken from an OCR, transcript or PDF file. Note that if PDFs have no matching OCR files, text will be automatically extracted from PDF.

You can also extract manually using a profile's 'Insert OCR/Transcript' button. That gives you more control in specific cases.

try it - Extracting profile text manually
  • Click on the 'Insert OCR/Transcript' button to extract text from the profile's PDF.

The Insert OCR/Transcript window is displayed.

  1. Skip this field as we are not selecting an OCR or transcript file on disk. If you are, navigate to its folder and select it.
  2. This is the command you'll use most often.
    • Click it to select the profile's PDF. Its details are filled in as shown below.
  1. Skip this field as our document's page numbers match PDF's document pages. A document's page numbers can differ from a PDF's page numbers. For example, page 1 of a document may start on page 3 of the PDF. This field lets you set the starting page number for extraction if necessary. Click the '?' for more details.
  2. Skip this field as we do not need to optimize table formatting for any pages.
  1. There are several options for this field.
    • No page and line numbering. Gives you straight text matching the input text file, line by line. Long lines are wrapped. You can also type a number to set a page length. For example, entering 30 starts a new page 30 lines and numbers from 1. Note that MasterFile ignores this option when extracting text from supported transcript formats or a PDF.
    • Sequential line numbering -- no page numbers. As above, but lines are numbered.
    • Automatic page and line numbers (transcript or PDF). This is the default and will properly extract and format text in almost every case.
    • Transcript in PDF. Try this option when a proper transcript has been printed to PDF rather than be provided as a native transcript format. It will attempt to extract text using the transcript's line number to try and match the actual format but may not always work. Native transcript formats are always recommended.

We'll use the default.

  • Click OK and text is extracted as below.
Table formatting (#5)

PDFs do not retain tabular formatting information well and copying and pasting from any PDF viewers will illustrate this. Therefore, MasterFile will try and optimize table formatting for pages or page ranges you type into 'Pagination style'. See the context help ('?') for more information. An example is shown below on the right. Note that table extraction for the specified pages changes their font to monospace.