[Lexicog] MDF

[Koontz John E]

On Sat, 27 Mar 2004, Ron Moe wrote:
> You are correct that MDF was less than universal. It was designed for
> Austronesian languages in Indonesia ... In spite of its drawbacks, I
> felt it was a good program. At least it enabled us to have a standard
> for fields within Shoebox. If nothing else, that simplified our lives
> immensely.

Yes, I didn't mean to sound quite so captious.  It looked very nice in
what it did with the structure it supported.  I was disappointed at its
lack of flexibility wrt that structure in proportion to my anxiousness to
use it on a different structure!  However, when I found SF Converter I was
satisfied with that, though I could see some ways in which it could be
improved - the possiblity of converting fields to records or vice versa
that I mentioned a while back as a way of accomodating the different
paragraph structures of database and publication.  However, that sort of
thing can be done by a separate tool, and programming - using CC for
example - is a good stopgap measure when no suitable tool is available.
Because the underlying data representaiton (SF) is so well defined and so
suitably defined, it's pretty easy to manipulate it.

In a way, I think that modular tools that fit together because they use
the same data representations and allow a lot of flexibility may be even
better than monolithic be-all, end-all tools with some inflexible
Achilles' heel that you can't get at.  Of course, there's only so much you
can do by running separate programs on the same file.  It's awkward with
SF Converter that you have to run "printing" as a separate process.
Shoebox's interlinear facilities are so nice because they're built in, for
example.  One solution might be a sort of "plug in architecture" like the
big commercial graphics packages use, or browsers.




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