README

WISH Superscriptorium 2008
by David McClamrock <mcclamrock@locl.net>

Based on "Words" by William Whittaker
and "Glossator" by Mike Polis

Available for download at "Pa Penguin's Icebox"
<http://www.geocities.com/pa_mcclamrock>


WISH Superscriptorium 2008 is a simple computer-aided Latin-English translation program, using plain-text grammar and vocabulary data files derived from William Whittaker's "Words" program by way of Mike Polis's "Glossator." It requires Tcl and Tk 8.5 (or greater, when there is an even greater version). The main program window consists basically of three scrolling text widgets side by side, with the headings "ORIGINAL TEXT," "TRANSLATION OPTIONS," and "TRANSLATION," below some menus and mini-toolbar buttons.

Latin words can be inserted into the "ORIGINAL TEXT" box by typing, pasting, or opening a file. When the user clicks on a word, here's basically what will happen:

* The word will appear with a green background in the "TRANSLATION OPTIONS" window, with a dot between what appears to be the root, stem, or base of the word and the grammatically significant suffix (if any). Also in the green background will be what part of speech the word appears to be, together with abbreviations for things such as the gender of nouns and adjectives (M, F, N for masculine, feminine, neuter), declension of nouns and adjectives (e.g., D1 for first declension), conjugation of verbs (e.g., C2 for second conjugation), case taken by preposition (e.g., "w/Acc" means the preposition takes the accusative case, "w/Abl" means it takes the ablative). If the word has more than one definition or more than one possible grammatical analysis, it will be repeated for each.

* A brief definition of the word (not necessarily specific to the grammatical function of the word being analyzed) will appear with a yellow background.

* The infamous "duplicitates Latinæ" (i.e., confusingly duplicitous or multiplicitous word endings, and uses of the same ending to serve more than one grammatical purpose in Latin) will be conquered, or at least set forth so a user with some rudimentary knowledge of Latin can conquer them, with human-readable abbreviations for the number and case of each grammatical possibility.

After that, if desired, the user can use the "TRANSLATION" box for anything from a rough scratch pad filled with bad guesses about the meaning of sentences, to a real "super-scriptorium" displaying an elegant, polished translation (if the user knows how to produce one). The mini-toolbar buttons and the features of the File, Edit, Search, and Display menus are adapted from WISH Supernotepad 2008.

To install the program:

1. Running as root, change directory (cd) to the directory containing the .tar.gz package, and unpack it into a new "superscrip-2008" directory by running this command: tar -zxvf ./superscrip-2008.tar.gz .

2. Change directory to the "superscrip-2008" directory and run this command: ./superscrip_install.tcl . As well as installing the program and related files, this will automatically create an uninstallation script (./superscrip_uninstall.tcl) that you can run from the same directory if you ever wish to uninstall WISH Superscriptorium.

By default, files will be installed under the /usr/local directory as follows.
/usr/local/bin : program script and any other executable files
/usr/local/doc/wishes : documentation and license
/usr/local/lib/wishes : all other files

If you don't like /usr/local, just do this:

1. Edit the line near the top of the "./superscrip_install.tcl" file, where it says "set topdir /usr/local" -- change "/usr/local" to the top-level directory you want.

2. Do the same to the line that says the same thing near the top of the "./usr/local/bin/superscrip" program file. (You have to do both, or the program won't find all the files it needs!)

To run the program from the Linux/Unix command line, enter "superscrip &" (without the quotes) to open it blank, or "superscrip <insert name of file you want to view> &" to open it with a file already displayed. It's been reported to work on Windows too, except for the printing and Palm Doc conversion.

If you try this program out, please let me know especially if you find any bugs or omissions, so I can correct them in the next version of the program.


David McClamrock
April 2008

