Preserving a special alphabetical order when making an MDF RTF in Toolbox

[Stephen Morey]

Dear RNLD list,

 

My question is this:

How to get Toolbox to produce an MDF RTF that preserves a special 'alphabetical order'?

 

I have a Toolbox Lexicon of around 4200 items in the Tai Ahom language, which uses its own script, for which I have made a font. I'm wanting the Dictionary to use the rather eccentric Tai Ahom 'alphabetical order'. To specify this sort order, through the Project - Language Encodings section of the menu I have entered every Ahom syllable in the order that they are to appear. After doing this, wiithin Toolbox the correct order displays, and the .txt file that contains the data keeps the correct order.

 

However, when I try to export an MDF RTF, the citation forms (\lx field) comes out in English alphabetical order, which I cannot then resort into the correct order. To produce my dictionary then I need to take the underlying text file and manipulate it, and that's time consuming.

 

I've checked all the available features of the Export to MDF within Toolbox and can't find anything that would indicate that Toolbox is being asked not to take account of the special sort order.

 

Can anyone help me solve this problem?

 

Stephen Morey

Research Centre for Linguistic Typology

La Trobe University