how are "other languages" tagged in baseline text tab?

[Martin Zaske]

Hello,

in our "normal" vernacular journalistic texts, which we paste into Flex,
we only have a handful of foreign words, or web-links, or whatever,
which we manually select and mark as French or English as appropriate.


But now I need to process several texts, which are 50% vernacular and
50% French. I do not want to remove all the French portions, because
that would destroy the structure of the text.

So now I am investigating for a smart way of telling Flex which portions
in our baseline are French. Does Flex use or recognize any tags for that
purpose? For example, I could prepare the text to have all <fr>portions
françaises</fr> tagged like this, if there is a way to process that into
writing-system-information for Flex.

I looked all over the search+replace but cannot find a way of doing this
automatically. I can find French portions which are already marked as
such, but I cannot apply "French"-writing-system by way of search+replace.


I have found a similar option in MS Word: I can do a search for
something, and then apply French-language-information to all the
"somethings" which I have found. So I am hoping for a solution along
those lines.


Thank you for your ideas. Please do not tell me that I should not want
what I want. It would be an obvious and trivial and sad "solution" to
destroy our texts and just remove all the French before pasting. But our
needs are more complex than that.

I am not afraid of a hack or of learning something in the process, so if
you have some workaround which will make this possible, I will consider
even nerdy solutions gladly.


thank you all,

Martin


--
Martin Zaske; BP 50, Bassila, Benin
+229 97.44.62.95

[Allan Johnson]

Hi Martin,

My first thought was - yes, there's a way to handle that. But what I'm remembering is the dictionary import process. There's a stage of that process which does let you define tags similar to what you showed, and the import process will then attach a specified character style to whatever has been tagged in that way.

So it feels vaguely hopeful that something like that should be doable, since the dictionary import process knows how to do it. But I don't know how to get at that kind of functionality for pasting in text. 

There is a Bulk Edit process available for wordforms. But I don't know if Bulk Edit is capable of applying styles. And - if I recall correctly, the Bulk Edit doesn't apply to the original text, anyway - just to the collection of wordforms that have been created from the pasted-in text.

Any further thoughts on any of this which might lead to a way forward for Martin?

Tinkering with the baseline a little bit, I do see at least that any desired writing system or text style can be manually selected and applied to any given piece of text. So what's needed is something that will automate this according to the tags that Martin puts in the text before pasting it into FLEx. The Search/Replace function that you were talking about Martin - that seems like the right place to look. There in that dialog box I do see buttons for the writing system and style. But it seems to maybe be just for the searching, not for the replacing. Not sure on that. Hoping for fuller insight from somebody else.

Allan

--
You are subscribed to the publicly accessible group "FLEx list".
Only members can post but anyone can view messages on the website.
To change your status, please write to flex_d...@sil.org.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FLEx list" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to flex-list+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to flex...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/flex-list/adf1ce0f-502b-fda0-b48b-99883848236d%40sil.org.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Ken Zook]

Martin,

The Edit...Replace dialog on the interlinear baseline has a More button that
reveals extra options. If you check "Match writing system" then you can set
the writing system for the replacement by highlighting the replacement, then
choose Format...Writing System...select the desired writing system. This
seems to work although it seems to delete the trailing space when I am
trying to replace one word with the same word in another writing system. The
dialog allows regular expressions, but when that is enabled, it will not
allow matching or changing the writing system.

So sorry, I don't think you can do what you want in the UI.

You could do something like this in the fwdata file. If you want details on
this, contact me off-list.

Ken

[Martin Zaske]

Thank you Ken,

for your very helpful answer. If we had a lot of those texts and very
regularly, I would learn how to hack the fwdata file. We have a handful
now, but later it will only be a fraction of the amount each month.

So for our present needs, we will take a deep breath, have a moment of
silence and will then chop our texts in two portions:

We will use reference numbers. This will mean that we store the
vernacular portions in our Flex-text-corpus and can do spell checking
but will need some other place where we re-splice the spell checked
output from Flex back with the French portions for further steps in our
work-flow.

We can do all that, it would have just been much nicer to keep our
entire texts in Flex. We recognize that our needs are somewhat exotic,
so we try to stay open minded.


In fact, at the moment we are preparing a proverbs-website with eight
languages in parallel, so running bi-lingual texts through Flex is not
our worst idea... We only run four writing systems in Flex, the rest is
like a hobby to encourage the population, who got expats in many
countries...

Greetings,

Martin