From nellardo@concentric.net Fri Sep 17 04:26:12 1999 X-Digest-Num: 236 Message-ID: <44114.236.1277.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 07:26:12 -0400 (EDT) From: David Brookshire Conner Subject: Lojban word processor for Windows? Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group writes: > Any of you programmers out there willing to try to come up with a simple > Lojban word-processor? I am thinking of something for Windows, but of > course there will be a bunch who would rather write it for Unix. Of course :-) Oddly enough I was thinking about just this problem this morning as I was walking to work. In particular, Loglan's regular structure gives the text editor lots of help in e.g., automatically typesetting (a la LaTeX). > What I have in mind is something that supports Wordpad style editing (there > may be some open code already for such a simple editor, since Lojban uses > the standard alphabet, in which case the programming is mostly in the > utilities that follow)), Another approach, of course, is to write extensions for editors that support that kind of thing. Emacs comes to mind :-) So does Framemaker (which runs on everything, though is pricey). An Emacs major mode should be straight-forward. I'm a little surprised one doesn't already exist (or am I wrong here?). Easy stuff like recognizing sentence structure and piping text to the parser. An initial Framemaker extension would consist simply of a document template with lots of smart "paragraph" styles (with each "paragraph" in Framemaker being a lojban bridi). For example: StartUtterance - first sentence, following "paragraph" is ContinueUtterance - "autonumbered" to start with ".i " StartParagraph - autostarts with .ni'o, next para is continueUtterance. etc. formatting makes all this look pretty. On another tack, a lojban font would be an interesting problem. Specifically, the ligatures would probably be different from an English font (as letter frequency is different), and would probably emphasize the cmavo. > with a Lojban word-list spell checker, Should be a matter of assembling a dictionary and giving it ispell (for emacs) or framemaker, making sure to tell it that this is a different language. For that matter, internationalizing any of these editors would be interesting. Both Frame and Emacs (Mule) have support for this. > one which > would call up the place structure on a mouse click, A little trickier but again, primarily just needs a database of the place structures. > or give the breakdown > of a legal but undefined lujvo with a different mouse click. and a database of the rafsi.... > And then > finally you could invoke the parser in a pop-up window for any selected > chunk of text. Emacs is especially good at this..... Hmmm.... Might have to do it..... A Frame template will be easiest - anyone else out there have access to Framemaker to be a beta tester? Brook --------- ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI! --------- Fancy. Myth. Magic. http://www.concentric.net/~nellardo/