Thursday, November 8, 2012

Phrase-book material in a lexicon

Native speakers or learners of a language often find it useful to have a set of common phrases in the language.  But do these go in the dictionary?

It seems awkward to have entries like the following:


But an alternative is to use the Publications field in FLEx to define a separate Phrasebook.  You configure this via Lists | Publications and add a new Publication called Phrasebook. The default publication is Main Dictionary, so if you haven't changed anything, that is where all the entries will appear.

The default seems to be that all entries are in all publications.   I used the Bulk Edit commands to remove Phrasebook from the Publication lists of all the entry, then went back in and selected the entries I wanted for the Phrasebook.

For this entry, this means adjusting the Publications field to say only Phrasebook and not Main Dictionary.  After changing the field, it now looks like this:


In the lexicon pane, we can pick which dictionary to display.  The default will be the main dictionary:


From the pull-down arrow next to the words Main Dictionary Entries, we can also select other publications, such as the Phrasebook.  The following screen shows a partially populated Phrasebook:


2 comments:

Danny said...

What a great idea. I hadn't considered using the Publications list this way.

Aaron said...

Thanks, Danny!