Glossator
Glossator is a program to make it easier to read Latin. From top
to bottom, the interface consists of a menu bar, a main text window,
and a gloss window. The menu bar lets you load a file into the main
text window, copy, cut, and paste. The main text window holds the
text with which you're working and lets you edit it. When your mouse
passes over a word in the main text window, Glossator automatically
looks it up and displays possible forms (an example of a form is "verb
indicative active present 3rd person singular") and a brief definition
or definitions in the gloss window.
Glossator is written in Tcl/Tk, a
cross-platform scripting language with a GUI toolkit. It uses some
data files from Whitaker's Words,
a dictionary program with a large vocabulary and a command line
interface. No code from this program is used. As a result, Glossator
doesn't handle some of the hard cases which Words does (prefixes,
suffixes, syncopated forms, roman numerals, etc.). The reason for
this is that I wrote this as a small project and didn't want to deal
with integrating Ada and Tcl/Tk (especially since I don't know Ada).
The parsing may become more complete in the future.
The glossator source files (glossator.tcl and
words.tcl) are placed in the public domain, so you can
use them for whatever you want. The data files are part of Words, and
are being redistributed by permission. Glossator comes with no
warrantee or guarantee of any sort.
Installation
- Install Tcl/Tk
8.3 unless you already have a compatible version (8.2 or later) installed.
- Download Glossator 0.1 gloss01.zip
(about 750KB, unpacks to about 4MB) and unpack the zip file in the
directory where you'd like to keep Glossator.
- On Windows, double-click
glossator to start the
program. I suppose you do the same thing on a Mac, although I've
never run a Tcl program on a Mac. On Unix, run wish
glossator.tcl.
- If you want a more convenient way to start Glossator on Windows,
you can drag the glossator icon to the desktop with the right
mouse button and select "Create Shortcut(s) Here". If you
want to put it in the Start menu, open the Start menu by
right-clicking on the Start button and picking Open or Explore from
the pop-up menu, navigate to the part of the Start menu where you want
to put Glossator and create a shortcut as described above. Don't drag
it with the left mouse button and don't select Copy or Move after
dragging with the right mouse button--doing any of those will
break Glossator.
Support
I am a programmer, not a Latin scholar: I cannot answer your
questions about Latin. I am also a busy programmer, and don't have
much time to answer technical questions, but I'll try. See the bottom
of this page for my e-mail address.
Known problems
- When a file is loaded into the main window, the scrollbar is not
set up correctly, so it doesn't correctly indicate the proportion of
the text which is visible. As soon as the main window is scrolled,
the scrollbar functions correctly.
- Too much information is produced for qui/cui in the gloss window.
There are a lot of entries in the dictionary.
Related Links
Home
You can construct my e-mail address by putting mfp, an at sign, and
hotpop.com together. I don't state it here explicitly because I don't
want spam bots to find it.
Last updated 11 February 2000