discuss: Thread: Linux Dictionary Help Required

Hello out there,

I'm currently getting editing for preliminary publication. Does anyone know
of a way in which to convert the thing to XML/SGML without going insane =)
(please remember that its about 1300 pages). Its currently organised thus,

Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
New-line
Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
New-line
Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
etc....


Thanks,
Binh.

Binh

>Hello out there,
>
>I'm currently getting editing for preliminary publication. Does anyone know
>of a way in which to convert the thing to XML/SGML without going insane =)
>(please remember that its about 1300 pages). Its currently organised thus,
>
>Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
>New-line
>Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
>New-line
>Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
>etc....
>
>  
>
This should be easy. I suggest a little perl script that reads the file
from standard input,
spilts each line on the tab, sets two variables $meaning and $def, and
then inserts those
variables into the appropriate xml text , say using 'glossary' tags,
printing to a new file.
Then you can just add the superstructure to that file, to get the final
doc, or an external
file you can include in your doc.

This is possible also with a shell script using sed/awk, or with macros
in an editor like vim,
but I think perl is easiest.

Chris

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 09:43:24PM +1000, Binh Nguyen wrote:
> Hello out there,
> 
> I'm currently getting editing for preliminary publication. Does anyone know
> of a way in which to convert the thing to XML/SGML without going insane =)
> (please remember that its about 1300 pages). Its currently organised thus,
> 
> Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
> New-line
> Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
> New-line
> Meaning (Tab) Really long line which is the definition
> etc....

I would do it with a few one-off macros in Emacs.

I assume you want an alphabetic sort. You may have terms that need
special sort keys which are not the term defined. In that case, I'd
write a macro to take the term and duplicate it, like so:

key TAB term TAB definition NEW LINE

Then you can edit the sort keys as needed. e.g:

1 TAB One TAB The first integer after zero.
; TAB Semicolon TAB Character used in many languages to indicate the
end of a statement.
P TAB <p> TAB HTML Paragraph markup.

By putting the keys at the beginning of the line, you can sort on the
sort keys easily enough.

Next, an Emacs macro to encode the dictionary. I'd make the sort key
an SGML comment so that you can continue to sort on the keys after
you've encoded it. Something like:

<!-- 1       --><glossentry><glossterm>One</glossterm><glossdef><para>The first integer after zero.</para></glossdef></glossentry>

You should make all the comments the same length to make the sorting
easy.

-- 

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