(Fwd) Re: [Lexicog] dialect tagging

[David Joffe]

> Can you display this kind of info in some user-defined format in the
> output (like the printed dictionary)? e.g.
> 
> trunk ... 3. (British) rear compartment in an automobile
> 
> where the user defines the formatting, e.g. parens around the dialect
> tag (as above), or maybe italics; and of course the user decides where
> this information goes in the output, like in this case between the sense
> number (which I'm assuming is automatically generated in TshwaneLex) and
> the sense itself.
> 
> If there were multiple tags, you might want some separating punctuation,
> like ', ':
> 
> trunk ... 3. (British, Australian) rear compartment in
> an automobile

Certainly, you can do all of the above. These are in fact *basics* 
of a dictionary editing system - TshwaneLex could do all of these 
since before version 1 at least five years ago already - if it 
couldn't, I doubt we would've sold much by now.

The TshwaneLex Styles system allows you to define the output order 
of attributes and child elements relative to any element (including 
the automatic number, which is optional and is in fact just another 
attribute in the DTD), so you can easily configure it to output:

SenseNumber
Dialect
Definition*

or any order you prefer. You can also do this 'centrally' at any 
time - i.e. you can change the desired output order of attributes 
with just a few clicks even the day before you want to typeset the 
dictionary, and it will change throughout the dictionary.

Each attribute also has its own plain old formatting styles - bold, 
italics, font, font size, superscript, subscript, underline, etc. In 
addition to that, you can configure in the Styles system the common 
punctuation to be generated before/after (e.g. your brackets above) 
any attribute element, as well as *between* both list attributes 
(like the dialects) and between elements - so you can easily 
configure if you want to separate the multi-list items with a comma 
or any other string (comma is the default). (Can I post attachments 
to the list? I could show screenshots of this.)

And again, you can configure this at any time - e.g. if literally 
the day before you typeset you decide you want square brackets 
instead of round brackets throughout the dictionary, or want a semi-
colon instead of a comma between the dialects, you can change this 
centrally with just a few clicks, and all with a user-friendly 
interface so anyone can do it (though advanced users could bypass 
the interface and configure these things with scripts).

Again, sorry, but those are *basics* (I've long since taken these 
aspects 'for granted' now). In version 3 (which is now two years 
old) we even added programmable dynamic "smart" styles - for 
advanced users, of course, but this allows every aspect of the 
styles for every element or attribute to even optionally be decided 
in real-time by a script: 
http://tshwanedje.com/tshwanelex/overview.html#sma (as TshwaneLex 
has a built-in scripting language embedded). The possibilities for 
this are basically endless, but the screenshot at that link shows a 
basic sample whereby headwords are highlighted differently if 
they're amongst the most frequent as determined by a corpus (a 
common dictionary thing). Important to note is that in that sample 
this happens in real time - if you re-import new corpus frequencies, 
for example, the highlighting immediately changes to reflect the new 
information. Another sample included with TshwaneLex, and something 
fairly commonly done in dictionaries, is to output different 
punctuation depending on what appears before/after some specific 
type of information (e.g. if a usage example is preceded by a 
definition output ":", if preceded by (say) a cross-reference then 
output ";" - or whatever).


> I.e. can the user edit the configuration files? (perhaps as in
> applications like Endnote)

Not sure what you mean by this.

 - David

---
http://tshwanedje.com/
TshwaneDJe Human Language Technology




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