[Lexicog] Lexicography Software

[Allan Johnson]

Dimitris wrote:
> Would you be so kind as to advice me about the possibilities and the
> available software? Again, note that my effort is in greek.
>   
Neal_Brinneman at sil.org wrote:
> www.sil.org, look for software at bottom of home page and then get Toolbox
> which is a free program to handle dictionaries.
>
>
> Using a consistent change table, change the tab delimited text to \lx for
> the first lexeme, \ps for the second part of speech and \ge for the English
> gloss. Then open this file in Toolbox using MDF 4 database type.
> Neal
>   
Two other programs to consider are:

FieldWorks (http://www.sil.org/computing/fieldworks/BTE-FW_downloads.htm)
This has an advantage over Toolbox of avoiding any problems with 
inconsistent field order and with ambiguity regarding what sense a 
particular field is intended to be grouped with. It allows the displayed 
order of fields when viewing or exporting the dictionary to be readily 
changed at any point in the process of compiling the dictionary, without 
the tedious work that this requires in an SFM database of many entries. 
It has a disadvantage compared to Toolbox of putting a heavy load on 
system resources (memory in particular). If you want to use FieldWorks, 
the best route might be to first convert to MDF as Neal outlined, and 
then import this SFM database to FieldWorks. If you do the import to 
FieldWorks before a lot of editing in Toolbox, you're more likely to 
still have a consistent format which will readily import without the 
need for tedious cleanup work. Another disadvantage of FieldWorks is 
that its export formats are not yet fully developed. Currently the best 
option I know for printing is to export a configured dictionary to SFM, 
and then process this with Lexique Pro. The option for which I'm waiting 
expectantly is to be able to export directly to Word or OpenOffice and 
print from there. This is in the plans - hopefully to be available by a 
year from now.

Lexique Pro (http://www.lexiquepro.com/index.htm)
This works as a companion to either Toolbox or FieldWorks, providing 
additional functionality for viewing a dictionary and exporting it to 
RTF or HTML. Though I believe it was originally intended for just these 
things, it now also provides an editing capability, making it possible 
to manage a dictionary with this program alone. If you're interested in 
this approach, again the first step I believe would be to do the 
conversion to MDF that Neal outlined. Using this approach, your data 
will stay in the SFM format that Toolbox works with. It will continue to 
be available for editing in either Toolbox or Lexique Pro (just not at 
the same time). Being an SFM text file, it will still have the 
disadvantages mentioned above which FieldWorks was designed to overcome.

Allan J.



 
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