Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
There are a couple issue here that most of us know about but I'll
enumerate a few:
The lexdict driver in the engine is designed as a quick key lookup
datastore. There is some processing done to try to do best matches.
all numbered keys are padded, so
123 gets changed to 00123
This helps match strongs numbers.
Other keys get touppered to help match case insensitive. We can maybe
do other things like strip accents and diacritics, but we should
probably add something to the .conf file to allow different key
massaging. Just letting the module create massage the keys beforehand
isn't a great solution because the same massaging needs to happen on
the user input when they try to lookup a key.
Massaging keys is all beneficial for looking up the best match, in
most cases, and presenting surrounding entries sometimes helps the
user choose, provided they didn't like the resolution. Let's not
think of the surrounding keys as the 'order of the lexicon'.
Again, this is helpful background. It strikes me as a content creator
that the way indexes are handled is a "quick" solution to the problem of
performance. I can understand why it's done that way, but the effect is
awfully weird.
Presenting a lexicon as an ordered book is a different function. We
should not attempt to use the lexdict driver to support this.
Again, as a content creator, I can't imagine a case in which (for other
than technical reasons) a dictionary should be reordered. Usually people
who put dictionaries together have a reason for their order. If the
lexdict driver shouldn't support this, perhaps it should be used
exclusively for glossaries and not for lexicons. See next comments below.
If there is ever a time when you would want to present a lexicon as an
ordered book to an end user, then we should consider possibly having a
genbook index on the same module for that purpose.
A glossary is a much simpler animal than a lexicon or dictionary and is
often, in the print world, a smaller piece of a larger work. Some
reordering isn't the end of the world (though I still think it's a bit
wacky or twilight zone-ish). However, a lexicon is a work in its own
right and should not be reordered (under any circumstances). It should
have pages with a preface, introduction, a table of abbreviations,
bibliographic information, etc.
I may be going out on a limb here, but most of the time, I don't think
a user would want to see a dictionary presented as a book. I have
come across one exception, and that is our Hesychius module, but it is
really meant to be an ancient work studied as such. I think we could
create a lexdict module from the Hesychius data and it would be cool
to do lookups and present the data from it, like we do with other
SWORD lexdicts, but the primary purpose for the module is to make the
ancient work available for scholars in its original form-- the
original ancient work just happens to be a synonym lexicon.
I strenuously disagree (in all possible Christian love). I hate to bring
up other software, but when I need to do serious exegetical work I boot
into Windows and use a proprietary program (which motivates me to
develop SWORD to support my research needs!). That program allows me to
quickly look up word in my default lexicon by double-clicking on a word,
but when I want to browse the lexicon by letter I can do so in a side
pane with an expandable tree structure. It allows me to choose what sort
of key I want to use, so when I want to know the page number of an entry
(for referencing purposes), I can view that too. Generating page numbers
is a major undertaking for the module developer, and I wouldn't propose
to bring that in to the discussion here as a possible feature. My point
is that working with modern lexicons as an aspiring scholar (just got
word that I got into my PhD program of choice--yeah!), I want to view
lexicons in a form that is reasonably close to the print form, and I
want the functionality of any other type of module. I even want to be
able to search the text of lexicon entries (for example, for Scripture
references), not just look up an entry.
I realized in raising this issue again that much is forgotten over time
(chiefly by me!). I created a page on the wiki (finally figured out how
to do that in MediaWiki) at
http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/Complete_Lexicon_Functionality to put some
ideas out there and help me remember at least what the issues are. I
think if lexdict is going to remain the same, there needs to be an
alternate means to working with anything other than a basic glossary or
standard Strong's module (which lexdict handles quite well). I'm not
sure if added features for genbooks is the way to go or not (I can see
real merit to that), but lexdict is not the module driver for most types
of dictionaries. I invite anyone to join this discussion.
Daniel
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