[Lexicog] MDFdict files and toolbox export

[Dimitris]

hi to all  [:)]

Norbert Rennert wrote:
> Dimitris, the problem with using non-MDF fields in your lexicon is
that they are harder to support for exporting. I would not recommend
editing the .cct  table yourself unless you are very familiar with that
language. The cc tables which come with Toolbox are quite difficult. One
method I have used is to process the file after it is in RTF. You can
set the marker properties (right click on a marker in Toolbox) to export
as either character or paragraph style. Then in MSWord you can search
and replace for any extra characters that got exported. You can restrict
search and replace (in MSWord) to a specific style by choosing More >
Format > Style in the dialog box. I went through this process
successfully in publishing our dictionary in paper format.

Dear Norbert,
I have thought about making changes in the rtf file (and of course I
have already set my own .dot file) but I don't think this is such a good
idea since it is most probable that I will be adding and correcting data
in the database continuously. This means that I will have to apply the
same changes in the rtf every time! I suppose, it is an ultimate
solution but it isn't the correct way to do things.

Martin Hosken wrote:
> 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.

I will have a look; I'm not scared easily  [:)]

> 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.

I cannot blame MDF for that. It integrates a way to export data in a
printable format and you can choose either to use this or some other
tool instead. But you can constantly check on the output and this is
very useful, things look differently on paper (kind of better actually 
[;)] .

> 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.

I'm afraid, I have to agree with Robert that it is better to check the
export possibilities early. Imagine that you enter thousands lemmata
only to find eventually that you have been inputting incorrectly or that
the tool you use is incompatible with the rest of the world.

As for the new markers I mean to use, the thing is that I cannot find
some other solution to solve my problems. Maybe I am missing the obvious
but I've been reading the markers documentation a lot and I cannot see a
way to have it the way I need it. Which marker would be appropriate to
hold the articles (in case of nouns) for example? An article denotes
that the lemma is a noun but it is not the actual part of speech itself.
And articles should appear immediately after the lexeme and each
variants(\ps exported to rtf with Toolbox behaves differently). This is
a major problem of mine right now.

Again, look at this example:
synitheia (i) and synitheio (to) blah blah

some other friend proposed the CCT program. I will have a look there
too.

thanks for all the discussion,
honestly, you are my only support on this project,
hey, I buy beer if we ever get together  [:)]
Dimitris

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