Re: Lexicon management
| From: | Caleb <cph9fa@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, August 14, 2004, 4:38 |
|---|
I'm pretty new to vocabularies, and I hardly have any words yet, but
here's the strategy I'm starting adopt.
Spreadsheets are very nice. They have nice layout and formating
features, as well as powerful searching, sorting, and filtering
features. But let's face it, the data in them isn't very open if you
want to write your own tools for manipulating it. And they may or may
not be cross-platform compatible (or even cross software compatible --
Excel doesn't like my Corel Quatro Pro files eg.)
So the route I've taken is to place all my words into a simple text
file. I haven't decided for sure what to use for delimeters. Commas
are out because the definitions are sure to have some. Right now I'm
just using plain tabs, which seem to work pretty well, although I
might change in the future.
The benefits of text are tremendous. Corel can import text files with
arbitrary delimiter characters with little problem (I'd assume Excel
can do the same) so I get the benefit of spreadsheet processing.
Textfiles are cross-platform compatible (except for newline chars) so
I can use grep, sed, and awk too. I can edit them in any plain text
editor, including vi or Notepad. And the best part is that it
shouldn't be too difficult to write a simple program/script in one of
C/C++/Python/Perl to output my own HTML file -- or any other format
for that matter.
Granted, this is still all untested -- I've just begun the process.
But it sounds very promising to me.
~Caleb
--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@G...> wrote:
> Emaelivpeith Remi Villatel:
> > Now, I intend to write my own tool to suit my very special needs
but, first,
> > I'm asking: What do you use to handle your bilingual lexicon? I'm
very
> > interested, especially if it works on Linux... and if it takes
care of the
> > conversion into HTML too. But maybe am I asking too much? ;-)
>
> When I still ran Windows, I was quite happy with SIL's Shoebox,
which
coincidence!) Kura:
my