Reversal index & Pathway

[Lynnika Buter]

Hi all,

I'm about to drive myself crazy trying to output an English-Wiyot
glossary of plant & animal terms. Can anyone help me with the
following questions? :

1. After installing Pathway and updating Open Office (it was taking
forever to format), the next time I tried to export a dictionary FLEx
demanded that I install LibreOffice as well. I did, and a (somewhat
hinky) document does get created, but...why do I have to have an
entire new software suite? I thought I could publish via OO, which I
at least have some familiarity with, whereas I know nothing about
LibreOffice. What gives?

2. I want to create a maximally simple glossary, with English as
(bold) headwords and Wiyot as (plain text) translations. Since many,
many plants & animals have multiple Wiyot names, I would like the
glossary to display each on its own line under the headword, i.e.:

hazel bush
-da'belish
-lugulheswulh

...instead of what I get now which is all on one line and hard to
parse visually:

hazel bush da'belish; lugulheswulh

In the Configure Reversal Index view, I checked "display each sense in
a paragraph", which did what I wanted *except* that it automatically
includes the English gloss after the Wiyot, so I get English headword-
Wiyot translation-English sense, which is redundant (for now, the
sense is identical to the headword). How can I get my entries aligned
the way I want, *without* the English sense, without editing each
entry individually in the exported document?

If this isn't making sense, I can upload images or try to re-explain;
I become less articulate the more confused and frustrated I am.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have,
Lynnika

[Beth (work) Bryson]

Hi, Lynnika.

1. LibreOffice is something of a successor or offshoot of OpenOffice. They actually both should work fine. In theory, LibreOffice is the one that supposedly has a future, but in the short term some people have found that some things work slightly better in OpenOffice. Anyway, I encourage you to feel free to try either one. The key for Pathway is that you need some tool that can open a .odt; it didn't have to be LibreOffice.

2. In FLEx, when you Configure Reversal Index, look under "Referenced Senses". This is where you control how much of the regular dictionary entry you want showing. Most people only want "Headword" out of all of that, but more is checked by default, partly to help people know that it is even configurable.

Try unchecking all of the other things under "Referenced Senses" other than Headword.

Then click on Headword and see what character style it is using. By default it is Dictionary-Headword, which puts it in bold, which is typically not what people want for that in a Reversal Index. I tend to change it to Dictionary-Vernacular, which gets it into italic by default.

Let me post this much for now; I'm not quite sure about the new line, but I'm sure it must be possible.

-Beth

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[Lynnika Buter]

Beth, thanks for the clarification on LibreOffice; I now feel a bit
better about having added yet another software suite to my PC.

I got as far as only checking "headword" under "Referenced Senses", as
well as changing the style to plain text (in order to leave out
redundant English). But I can't get the various Wiyot words formatted
as visually separate entities under an English headword. I've been
trying some find-and-replace tactics in the LibreOffice document, but
even using RegEx I can't get it to replace e.g. a semicolon or slash
between words with a line break.

Another sort of global question I have about the end product is how to
do things like get rid of all the alphabet headings (my doc is so
small they are obtrusive), or otherwise modify all instances of a
particular field, without editing each one individually (i.e. I don't
want to have to physically delete the "Aa" header, then the "Bb"
header, and so on). This seems like something that should have an
obvious answer, but I haven't been able to find it.

Thanks,

Lynnika



On May 16, 2:57 pm, "Beth (work) Bryson" <Beth-work_Bry...@sil.org>
wrote:

[Beth (work) Bryson]

Okay, just checked this out...

In FW 7.1 and later, when you are configuring the senses (in the regular lexicon or the reversal), you have an option to "Display each sense in a paragraph". That is a pretty new feature and I don't know how well it has been tested out, but it is intended to do something similar to what you want. (I am getting it with "hazel bush" indented a little and the vernacular words all the way to the left margin, which is not what you want. I know there are more ways to configure this; I'm not sure of the details right now.)

One more comment: I think you are not using Grammatical Categories, is that right?

If you were, it's important to note that there is one set of categories for the reversal index (to indicate the part of speech of the word in "audience" language (analysis language)), and another to indicate the category of the vernacular words, because sometimes they are different. Typically in a reversal index someone would include the analysis language category, not the vernacular category.

Just pointing that out for anyone else working with a reversal index.

Regarding getting rid of the alphabetic headers, I think that is a Pathway setting--there are ways to configure Pathway further.

Others who know the answers to these things have already left for the day; I imagine you'll get more answers tomorrow.

-Beth


On May 16, 2012, at 1:53 PM, Lynnika Buter wrote:

[Robert Hedinger]

Regarding alphabetic headers. I haven't seen this as an option in Pathway. I
think this would be a good option to add, so you can choose whether or not
to have these A a, B b, etc. headers.

Robert

[J V C]

Yes, it would be great if these headers could be turned off. They were
especially troublesome to me (and hard to delete) when I published our
two-column dictionary because each one created two section breaks
(before and after the header, so that the header would span both columns).

Lynnika, while viewing the reversal index, you can configure quite a lot
by going to Tools, Configure, Reversal Index. If "display each sense in
a paragraph" can't be made to work the way you want it, you could change
the separator character between senses. I believe you would click on
Referenced Senses and fill in the Between field. You could use something
unique as the separator, something like two semicolons (;;) or a pipe
(|), so that replacing it later with a line break in Writer should be
simple and safe.

Or better, put a special line break character there so that you have
less work to do in Writer each time you export. The following works
on-screen for me in FLEx, though I've not tried exporting it via Pathway
myself:
- in Lexicon Edit, type the following into a blank definition in FLEx:
x shift+enter y
(Just FYI, that line break character is U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR.)
- copy both lines from the definition field (you should see x, then y on
a second line; copy both lines)
- go to reversals configuration, and paste into the Between field; you
should see x box y--delete the x and y but leave the box there

If you choose to instead do the line breaks in Writer, replacing ";;"
with "\n" works fine for me (with the Regular expressions box ticked).
Removing/replacing line breaks is much harder, but I don't think you
need to do this. (When I do need to, I tend to save as .DOC and use MS
Word, since Word's ^p metacharacter works for both finding and replacing.)

Jon