[Lexicog] MDFdict files and toolbox export

[Martin Hosken]

Dear Dimitris,

> First of all, I saw no other way to have it the way I need it, than
> introducing two new markers \ar for the article (in case of nouns) and
> \gs for grammatical notes (on the declension, for example).

It's a long time since I hacked around with MDF export, but if you want to add a new marker, then there a few places you need to add information:

mdf.typ needs to have the new marker and set it to character style
mdf?.dot needs to have styling for the new marker
and the mdf?dict.cct files need to do sensible things with the markers.

I know that some effort has been underway for a while to make MDF export much more flexible, but when that involved a huge number of cct files (like 10) people started looking for different approaches to typesetting dictionaries. One such tool is shlex which is part of the Shoebox Utilities, which can be found at http://scripts.sil.org/shutils-manual but that is a pretty fearsome tool if you haven't used it before.

The problem with MDF is that it tries to be two things at once. It tries to be both a true lexical database and a lexical document at the same time. The result is that it keeps tripping over itself. A better solution is to concentrate on the database aspect when doing data entry and only worry about document layout when it comes to final typesetting of a dictionary. This is the direction newer tools are taking.

Yours,
Martin

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