Exporting both gloss and definition via MDF

[René van den Berg]

Hello,

I'm René van den Berg, a Dutch linguist working with SIL in Papua New Guinea.

I'm working on a lexical database of Bola, an Oceanic language of PNG, which I inherited. The meanings given in this rough database are somewhat randomly split over gloss and definition field; often both are filled, and both are needed. I'd like to print both fields using MDF, but where both are filled, MDF lets \de override \ge. And so I don't see the gloss in the exported and printed document. 

I realise I can easily do this through sfm export, but I'd like a nice printout that I and co-workers can check with native speakers. Thanks for any help.

[Tony Naden]

The gloss is supposed to be used for the reversal to English (or whatever) export.  I would just search/replace (in a text-processor)  \gl with a semicolon, appending it to the definition.

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[Karen Buseman]

Hi, Rene, and welcome to the Group!

Before doing anything too drastic, please back up your whole project. Changing something throughout the data is always a good time to backup.

I was going to tell you how to change the MDF processing to avoid the merge, but Tony's suggestion is definitely the easiest and the least prone to error.

There are actually four fields in MDF where some type of glossing can occur. 

• \de -- definition
• \ge -- gloss for interlinear, usually terse, ideally one word, general
• \re -- gloss for reversals, again somewhat general
• \ee -- encyclopedic information which can be several sentences.

I've seen plenty of dictionaries where people have used \ge for everything.

You can do as Tony suggested in a word processor or in Notepad. But you can just change \de to \ge. MDF will insert a semicolon between multiple glosses.

OR, you can do it in Toolbox itself. (maybe)

Go to Database, Properties, and select the marker to be changed (presumably \ge) and click on Modify. OR, as a shortcut, do a Right Click on \ge in the Marker Pane to the left of the data. Toolbox will bring up the Marker Properties dialog box for that marker.

          

Change the marker itself to \de.

You should see the message: Merge markers? Check the Yes button. If it succeedes the \ge markers will all become \de markers and the \ge will be erased from the MDF database type. (You can reinsert it, if you want it.)

However, for some reason, when I tried to merge the \ge marker into \de to illustrate this for you, I got the message: Cannot merge marker. I've merged markers other times and not seen that message before. I don't know why it occurred. Very annoying for it to occur when I want to demonstrate the process, but maybe good you are warned of the possibility.

So you may have to use Tony's suggestion of using a different program to change the markers.

Karen

Toolbox Support