[Lexicog] Preparing one's Shoebox dictionary for the publisher?

[Mike Maxwell]

Koontz John E wrote:
> The main difficulty here is that this conversion process inevitably
> does involve some degree of programming, and this may or may not be
> feasible for a given linguist or linguistic project.  It would be
> highly desirable if some of the more typical processes could be
> incorporated into the standard facilities of Shoebox or SFC.  Perhaps
> I am out of date enough not to know that facilities for this now
> exist.

I don't know about Shoebox, but I will mention that one of the design goals
of LinguaLinks (which was substantially realized, I believe) was to provide
many views of the data.  At least one of these views was a publication view,
which could be altered (e.g. by choosing which fields to include) by the end
user.

> It's very important to resist the urge to edit the publication format of
> the database.  Above all never change the data or its ordering at this
> stage, because, of course, this results in the database (Shoebox) file and
> publication file getting into inconsistent states, and in producing a
> publication you are not abandoning the database.  In the modern world the
> database format is at least as important as the publication format...

I don't recall whether the publication view in LinguaLinks is editable (Lou
may comment), but if it is, any such edits were made to the database itself,
thereby avoiding the all-too common situation where you find a mistake in
the publication version, make an edit to that, but forget to make the
corresponding change to the database (as happens with any export/import
method, including export to Word).

While I am not working on FieldWorks (or even an SIL member any more), I
think I can say with some confidence that future SIL lexicography tools in
the FieldWorks line will provide built-in publication views, including
web-based publication views.  Any substantive (as opposed to formatting)
changes made in these views will be made to the database.  (Of course,
there's nothing to prevent someone from actually editing an HTML file.  But
that's not what you're supposed to do--if you don't like the HTML view, then
fix it inside FieldWorks, either by editing your data, or by changing the
view in ways that FW allows--which should not require any programming on the
part of the end user!)

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




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