Help

In Welsh or English you can choose a book, browse its images and text, search within a book, download the text of the book and search across the entire collection of books.

Language choice

The splash page offers an initial language choice, English or Welsh, however you can swap language on any point by following the English/Cymraeg link (top right navigation bar). The books themselves have not been translated, nor have the table of contents for each book.

Choosing a book

The splash page leads to the homepage. Here you can see the entire collection (currently 9 books). Choose a title or a thumbnail to browse the book. You can return to the homepage at any point by the "home" link (top right navigation bar) or by the "Books from the Past" logo (top of each page).

Navigating through a book

Once you have chosen a book you arrive at the "Start of Book" page. This includes a title, an image of the book, some digital and source edition detail (right hand side) and a brief description (bottom of page).

Begin browsing the contents by choosing "Browse page images" or "Browse book as text" (left hand side).

Once you are within the contents of a book there are "first" "previous" "next" and "last" links on the right hand side of each page. There is also a "go to page" box (top left) if you know which page you are looking for. At any point you can switch between text and image views of each page (left hand side). The book logo (top left) will take you back to the start of book page, as will the "start of book" link (top right navigation bar).

There is also a table of contents link (bottom left). The table of contents page displays the major divisions in the book and allows you to skip quickly to a new chapter/act/volume etc.

Searching within a book

Once you are within a book there is a search box on the left hand side. This allows you to search for text in the current book. By default, this search is not case sensitive (so "face" or "Face" will work equally well), it does not use boolean operators, nor does it search on mutations or diacritics. There are tick boxes beneath the search box to include mutations and diacritics in the search.

Some definitions

• Boolean: Boolean describes words such as AND, OR, and NOT that are used to combine search terms to broaden or narrow the results of a search. Combining terms using operators is sometimes called Boolean searching. Boolean operators on our site are & | "" and !
• Diacritic: A diacritic is a mark added to a letter or symbol indicating a change in its usual pronunciation, e.g. à, ê, ô
• Mutation: Mutations are instances where the initial letter of a word changes depending on its grammatical context. For example, the word for "stone" is "carreg", but "the stone" is "y garreg" (soft mutation), "my stone" is "fy ngharreg" (nasal mutation) and "her stone" is "ei charreg" (aspirate mutation). (description source: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language' 2004-05-07).

Including diacritics and mutations in a search effectively broadens the search.

Changing default search settings

There is a link to the "Set search preferences" page below the search box (left hand side). Here you can customise your search settings if you wish. These settings will last throughout your session on the website.

Options are:

• Query mode: Simple or Boolean (see above for definition)
• Case differences: Ignore or account for case differences
• Word Endings: Ignore word endings or whole word must match. This option is useful when searching for English pluruls (e.g. 'house' or 'houses'). However, searches for plural mutations found in Welsh are not supported: e.g. singular "mab" (meaning 'son') - plural "meibion".
• Hit return: limit the number of search hits returned by the search
• Hits per page: limits the number of search hits displayed at a time

After choosing search preferences use the "set preferences" button to save your settings.

Searching the entire collection

There is a "collection search" link on every page (top right navigation bar). This allows you to search across the whole of the digital collection (currently 9 books).

You can combine collection search options in many different ways. Search options are:

• Search for text: a free text search across every word in the collection
• Book Title: when you know the title (or most of it)
• Book Author: when you know the author (or part of their name)
• Subject: books have been categorised according to the listed subjects. You can choose as many subjects as you like
• Publisher: when you know the name of the publisher (or part of it)
• Date of Publication: when you know the date the book was published
• Period: books have been categorised according to the listed periods. You can choose as many periods as you like
• Language: Welsh or English texts. You can choose either or both

Collection search results are returned in order of relevance.

Downloads

Once you are within a book there are links (left hand side, below the search box) to download the entire book in three different file formats: PDF, ASCII, or RTF.

• PDF (Portable Document Format): A file format that allows files to be viewed regardless of the program that originally created them. Text formatting in our PDFs closely matches formatting in the original books. To view PDFs, download the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available free from Adobe's Web site. PDF files cannot easily be edited.
• ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange): A standard character-to-number encoding widely used in the computer industry. Includes no special formatting, so the formatting and typography in our ASCII files will not match the original book. ASCII text represents characters only from the Latin-based languages which means that the unique Welsh characters ŷ and ŵ will not appear correctly. ASCII based files can opened by any text editor (eg Microsoft Word) and can be edited.
• RTF (Rich Text Format): A document format which allows documents to retain their formatting when transferred between platforms and over the Internet. Text formatting in our RTFs achieves a fairly good match with the original books but are optimised for printing on A4 paper. RTF files can be opened by most text editors (eg Microsoft Word) and can be edited.