HPSG Diagrams

[Yehuda N. Falk]

At 21:40 02/12/02 +0000, Ian Underwood wrote:
>Dear HPSGers
>
>Can anyone please tell me what software is typically used for creating
>HPSG diagrams? Microsoft equation editor is useful to some extent, of
>course, but I was wondering if there is a better alternative available. In
>particular, I have been unsuccessful in creating tags, and I usually have
>to draw the angled brackets of lists free-hand because otherwise they
>appear equally large as the structures that they contain.
>
>--
>Ian Underwood

Here are some thoughts from an outsider who occasionally needs to do HPSG
diagrams, and doesn't use LaTeX.

As you say, the Equation Editor which is bundled with M$ Word and
WordPerfect is useful -- it certainly makes nice AVMs. The brackets for
lists grow to the size of the structures they contain by design, but this
can be worked around by just inserting the angle-bracket characters from
the Symbol font.

As for boxed tags, they are a problem. The trick is to use MathType. The
equation editors are actually dumbed-down versions of MathType; the full
MathType program (surprise, surprise) has a box template which can be used
for HPSG tags. MathType can be downloaded from the web site of Design
Science, the company that makes it:

http://dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/win/mteval.asp

The catch is that MathType is not freeware, exactly. The download will give
you a 30-day evaluation copy, after which you are expected to fork over an
unreasonable $99 (and that's the discounted price for academics). If you
don't pay up, the program dumbs itself down to MathType Lite, which is free
but doesn't have the box template. But, MathType Lite can import the box
template. What I did was save a copy of the box template, and now I
copy-and-paste it whenever I need it.

                            Yehuda N. Falk
       Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
                     Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel
                        msyfalk at mscc.huji.ac.il
      Personal Web Site    http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/
     Departmental Web Site    http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~english/

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