HPSG Diagrams

[Mike Maxwell]

Tony Abou-Assaleh wrote:
> For MS Word, I've heard of MathType but never used it.

Last year, I got the ff. email from Bob Matthews, the Director of
Training at DesignScience, the company that publishes MathType.  (I'm
cc'ing him in this msg, so his address should appear in your copy of
this msg.)

    If you want to try EE's upgrade software, MathType, it's
    available as a 30-day full-featured evaluation, but usable
    indefinitely beyond the trial period.  If you choose not to
    purchase it during the trial period, it turns into "MathType
    Lite", which has all the EE features plus a few more.  Anything
    you create during the trial period will remain fully usable and
    editable indefinitely, even if you used features that were
    disabled after the trial period.  It might be worth a try, to
    see if MathType does the same thing.  If you want to download a
    copy, there's a link off our home page: www.dessci.com/.

I have used "MathType Lite" for feature matricies, although I haven't
tried anything very complicated.  It works well for what I wanted to do
(but see below re Paul Kay's msg on tags).

Georgia wrote:
>Meanwhile, the EQ "code" Piotr Banski cites doesn't look any
> less "arcane" than LaTeX to me...

I've never used LaTeX, but from what I understand, the two are very
different: LaTeX is a programming language for words, equations etc.,
while MathType is a wysiwyg solution.  Indeed, when I try to reveal the
field codes in a Word doc into which I've embedded a MathType object, I
do _not_ see codes like Piotr's--perhaps that's only visible in Equation
Editor.  At any rate, the way you work with MathType (and normally, with
Equation Editor) does _not_ involve looking at arcane codes.

Paul Kay wrote:

> ...the Equation Editor (and I assume MathType, since it's
> supposed to encompass the EE) can do most, if not all,
> of what the HPSG writer needs, when combined with the
> insert-picture capability of word to draw the vertical and
> diagonal lines for trees - except for little boxes
> to make tags...

It looks to me like MathType will indeed insert little boxes, into which
one could then insert the numbers for the tags.  However, my 30-day
evaluation period has run out, so that part of MathType is
non-functional now.  However, I'm not sure how easy it would be to add
diagonal lines _inside_ a MathType "picture"--they don't seem to be in
the product.  Drawing them outside (to connect MathType objects) might
work, as per Tibor Kiss's msg.

Also, I used to have a hate relationship with another product, Visio
(since bought by Microsoft), which I used for drawing lines and boxes.
It would not handle the feature matrices itself, though, nor am I sure
how the product integrates with Word.

(Bob Matthews: I can forward the earlier msgs in this thread, if you're
interested.)

     Mike Maxwell
     Linguistic Data Consortium
     maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu