Shoebox & Toolbox

[Bill Jancewicz]

Shoebox/Toolbox

This is a linguistic database program that is designed to interlinearize
text, manage lexicons, do dictionary and wordlist work, and analyse text
corpora. Shoebox 5.0 has been around now for about three years and is very
stable and usable. It was reconfigured as "Toolbox" and released as Toolbox
1.0 (same program) with expanded ability to handle Unicode fonts and
encodings.

Several Algonquian dictionaries are being compiled, maintained and revised
on Shoebox, including Western Naskapi, Labrador Innu, Betsiamites Innu,
East Cree Northern, East Cree Southern, Atikamekw, Fort Severn Cree, Plains
Cree and Proto-Algonquian. The obvious benefit of having these in a similar
format in the same program is the ability to compare cognates.

Toolbox has a (very) few nice features added to the Shoebox program, but
for all intents and purposes it's identical to Shoebox, running the same
control and settings files that Shoebox does. The big difference is the
Unicode compliant part. It is possible to run either on the same data set.
But if the data set includes data outside the legacy ANSI 256 character
limit (Unicode encoding of Canadian Syllabics, say) then such data is only
usable in Toolbox and other Unicode compliant apps. (Unicode data not
backwardly compatable to Shoebox).

Toolbox is available for free download at SILs website:

http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software.asp?id=79

The release has a version number of Toolbox 1.0 Sep 2003. Alan Buseman is
working on the software to fix any bugs and implement recommendations from
the field.

Shoebox 5.0 is still supported by SIL, and does a great job on any data
that stays within the ANSI 256 character limit. Roman text, legacy fonts
and even "long vowels with hats" meet this criteria.

Bill Jancewicz