Nxaʔamxcín (Moses) Dictionary Blog

I've created a new MosesPhonemicCollation jar for sorting based on the phonemic representations. I've also forked the dictionary build process based on a parameter called "dictionaryType", which can be "learner" or "linguist". The former produces a dictionary based on the orthography, sorted with the MosesOrthographyCollation, and the latter produces one based on the phonemic transcriptions, with the new collation. The "alphabet" guides that run across the bottoms of pages are also appropriately different. I've abstracted the front matter into a separate file, and I'm auto-including the personography, although I'm not processing it yet.

The idea of having a single collation to sort everything in our db is now impractical, because the orthographical sorting rules clash with the transcriptional sorting rules, so I've created a new, simpler MosesOrthographyCollation class for sorting the orthography only. It's working well, but there are still some outstanding questions about it. In the meantime, we can't update the website because we don't have orthographies there yet, so this is only going to be used in for the print dictionary generation.

This has had to be redone a couple of times due to changes in the list of glyphs, but it's working now and tested with the print dictionary system.

We concluded that we need a different alphabetical order for the community dictionary vs. the linguists' dictionary.

The community dictionary should indeed follow the order in the 2006 language program dictionary - that is:

a aa ə əə č c cʼ h ḥ ḥʷ i ii k kʼ kʷ kʼʷ l lʼ ll llʼ ɬ ƛʼ m mʼ n nʼ p pʼ q qʼ qʷ qʼʷ r rʼ š s t tʼ u uu w wʼ x xʷ x̌ x̌ʷ y yʼ ʕ ʕʼ ʕʷ ʕʼʷ ʔ

The linguists' dictionary should follow the order in MDK's 1981 dictionary:

ʔ a ạ c c̣ cʼ ə ə̣ h ḥ ḥʷ i ị k kʼ kʷ kʼʷ l ḷ lˀ ḷˀ ɬ ƛʼ m mˀ n nˀ p pʼ q qʼ qʷ qʼʷ r rˀ s ṣ t tʼ u ụ w wˀ x xʷ x̣ x̣ʷ y yˀ ʕ ʕˀ ʕʷ ʕˀʷ

Today I got the following bits working:

• Running headers showing first and last items on dictionary pages.
• Front matter with independent numbering in roman numerals.
• Footers on dictionary pages showing alphabetical order (the order itself isn't yet finalized).
• Correct alignment and page-numbering for recto/verso pages (I'd screwed up on that).

Next is the implementation of the English-Moses glossary.

Proofing and rewriting. I've now finished section 4. The conclusion remains to be written, and the intro will have to be reworked at the end.

Worked through sections 1 and 2, and into 3, merging previous changes and suggesting more.

I now have some basic rendering for definitions and examples, so we're getting closer to something that looks like the final product will look. There are two chars missing from the fonts, but the author of the fonts may be able to add them for us (yay!). Other than that, things are looking good.

The author of the Aboriginal fonts kindly fixed the r-with-caron rendering problem we'd identified, within an hour of our reporting it, so it looks like that will be our font of choice. Tested and working now.

After looking with SMK at the way some characters are rendering in the PDF, I've created a function called hcmc:renderingFixups() which does some character substitution. Specifically, we're replacing i-with-dot-below + combining accent aigu or grave with i-with-accent plus combining dot below; and a similar thing with i-with-short-stroke. This last may not be as pretty as we hope, and there are still outstanding problems with the dot below m (off centre to right) and l (off to the left). We may be able to fix the latter by flipping briefly to another font, but that's very ugly. Still, these are minor issues, and so far CharisSil is working well for us.

SMK suggested CharisSIL, which I've downloaded and tested with XEP; it looks good. I'll now try integrating that into FOP. I've also updated the Collator after discovering that we had not included barred lambda without a following apostrophe, causing one (actually erroneous) example of that to be sorted to the beginning, a mystifying thing for a while. I've made a little more progress with the rendering of entries, but I don't have a model to work from yet so it's just exploratory.

Up to now, we've been using the excellent Gentium Plus fonts for our dictionary website, and they're working well; they're attractive and cover all the glyphs we need.

However, GentiumPlus comes only in regular and italic flavours; there's no bold version of the font. When we use "bold" on the website, the browser renderer automatically fattens-up the regular font to give the impression of bold; it's not particularly pretty, but it works. Unfortunately, that can't be done when generating the PDF. Neither Apache FOP nor the commercial XEP generator we use has the capability of automatically generating a bold version of a font from a regular version (and they would presumably argue that it shouldn't be done, because it's ugly, and would be especially noticeably so in print). So we're faced with three choices in the print dictionary:

• Eschew bold text altogether. This is not ideal, because dictionary entries depend for their readability on the textual differentiation of lots of information bits which appear next to each other.
• Choose a different font, one which has both bold and italic variants, for the whole dictionary.
• Choose a different font only for bits of the text which need to be bold.

We'll have to think carefully about this. I've written to the team for thoughts and suggestions.

Just reminding myself: I need the MosesCollation.jar file to provide the sort collation for the dictionary, and in eXist this is found automatically as long as it's in the WEB-INF/lib directory. However, locally, I have to add it manually to the transformation scenario -- on the first tab, click on Extensions, then Add, and find the jar file.