Lojban word processor for Windows?

[David Brookshire Conner <nellardo@concentric.net>]

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

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