[sword-devel] TEI dictionaries and front-ends: a suggestion for formatting entries

[Chris Little]

Daniel Owens wrote:
> Like I said, for what it's worth... Perhaps Lexique will give you some 
> food for thought. It's a nice program for producing a nicely typeset 
> dictionary quickly and with minimal expertise. I might create Perl 
> scripts to go between TEI and their format if I ever have the need.
> 
> I should have started with a question. When tagging dictionaries, then, 
> is the onus on the module creator to add punctuation and other means of 
> distinguishing elements? That would certainly be simpler for the 
> front-end developers, but if that is the case it would be helpful to 
> know what elements are styled in what way so that module creators don't 
> double-up on that sort of thing. Or if I use the <hi> element and a 
> stylesheet does otherwise, will it matter? Should I just "style-away" 
> using TEI?

As DM says, <entry>-based dictionaries and <entryFree>-based 
dictionaries are quite different and we will probably handle them 
separately. A third option that exists, especially important for 
<entryFree> dictionaries that come from printed sources, is entries that 
make extensive use of the rend attribute (which is the case in my 1913 
Webster's).

With <entryFree>-based dictionaries that make extensive use of rend, we 
should generate very little decoration other than what is specifically 
identified in the text. With other <entryFree>-based dictionaries, we 
will want to generate decoration like italicized <pron>, bolded <orth>, 
or small-caps <re> or <xr> links.

<entry>-based dictionaries are completely different, and we'll probably 
generate decoration, punctuation, paragraphing & linebreaks, etc.

So, in terms of how much decoration & punctuation you should add, it 
should depend on which kind of entry you use and how much decoration you 
want to do.

TEI support at this point is very preliminary. Just as soon as I'm 
finished encoding the 1913 Webster's, I'll take a look at it, the 
Viet-Anh dictionary, the NAS lexicons, and possibly some of the old 
Perseus/Germanic Lexicon Project dictionaries and try to develop some 
nice filters for RTF, HTMLHREF, & WEBIF. I can't say what it will 
necessarily look like, but I probably won't use any color or mid-line 
textsize changes.

In any case, we have a while before 1.5.12 will be ready, so we can do 
some testing before we settle on the generated rendering.

--Chris