More on dictionary generator

I would have included this under the original thread, but email is getting
conlang posts about 72 hours delayed right now. I just got Monday morning's
posts now (Wednesday noon).

I found some replies in the archives, so I will address those issues.

Since the program wil be written in Java it will run on any platform, and will,
by default, support Unicode. It will also have the ability, through the layout
templates, to assign any font to any column in the spreadsheet. So if you want
your conlang to use the Shavian alphabet, for example, you can assign some
Shavian font such as ghoti.ttf or lionspaw.ttf in the layout template.

In order to allow the same program to be used to generate a single-language
dictionary or a two, or three language dictionary, instead of automatically
generating two dictionaries, it will allow the user to select which spreadsheet
column is to be the "primary" word list to generate the dictionary from. That
way, the user can select only one column and generate a single-language
dictionary, or succesively select multiple columns and generate two, or three,
or more deictionaries, each keyed on a different column of words in the
spreadsheet file.

The template file can be either HTML or XML, and any kind of markup can be
used, so the output can be treated as pure HTML to be unploaded to a website,
or as XML for input into a PDF conversion program. I am also researching the
practicality of being able to output the dictionary as a formatted Postscript
file ready for printing.

It will also be possible to let a spreadsheet column be interpreted as an image
filename so that an HTML dictionary can be created for a pictographic language
by including a small GIF file for each pictograph. In this case a separate
column would need to be provided with the ordering of the pictographs so they
could be put in proper "alphabetical" order. (See for example my "LOTEP" system
of asigning numeric sequence numbers to pictographs.
http://www.fiziwig.com/glyph/glyphs.html or
http://www.fiziwig.com/glyph/piktok.html )

--gary