Draft version of the San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec dictionary

I posted a draft dictionary of San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec at sandionisiozapotec.webonary.org
today.  Here is a bit of a screen shot:

I have some problems now with the colors of the different languages -- English should be consistently black, but I can see that it is sometimes blue!

Bulk edit, character formatting, and regular expressions

I am continuing to proofread and correct the Copala Triqui online dictionary at copalatriqui.webonary.org.

One error that crept in at some point was the use of the wrong character styles for accented letters and anything that follows them.  (I think perhaps I cut and pasted these examples from a Word document...)  Consider the following entry:

In this entry, the accented characters are smaller than the characters before them in a way that looks odd.

In FLEx, I found that these characters don't have the default paragraph type, but instead are in a character style called "Character Style 2".  Checking on Character Style 2, I see that it is 12pt, while the Normal Text style is currently set at 16.  I change the Normal style up and down depending on what screen is being used; when we project the entries on the wall for work with our language consultant, I set it to a large font for better visibility.

 I suppose I could have redefined the font characteristics of Character Style 2 to 16pt, but it seemed to me that it would be a pain to always have to remember to change both the Normal Style and Character Style 2.

After trying various regular expressions, I found that this one gives the desired results:

The parentheses set up a capture group, which is referred to by the variable $1 in the Replace With field.  So this regular expression says "look for any character in áéíóúńj with Character Formatting 2 and make that the 1st variable" then "replace it with the 1st Variable but with Default Paragraph Characters format"

Some notes:

• I included n and j because the phonotactics of Triqui make these the only consonants that would follow an accute accent
• You can access the formats under the Format button. It seems like you need to select the whole Find or Replace string first to apply this format.
• In the Bulk Replace window, I set Example Sentences as the Target Field.

After doing this, I exported the project as XHTML again and uploaded it to Webonary.  Here is the same entry after the changes:

Creating an audio dictionary with Webonary -- A web version of the Copala Triqui dictionary

For the last several months, I've been working on a web version of the Copala Triqui dictionary, hosted by the kind people at webonary.org  (part of SIL).  They provided the space for the page and the audio files, and Philip was very helpful in giving me advice.

The current version is available at http://copalatriqui.webonary.org/  (This is a preliminary draft, and not everything works correctly.  Comments welcome!)

Steps in getting this to work:
1) Within FLEx, you output XHTML.  There are a few issues about how to set up the dictionary configuration to deal with multiple writing systems.  The hardest thing was working to get all the audio files to display.

The current configuration of the dictionary prior to export is as in the following entry:

Here the names of the audio files for the lemma and the examples come directly after these elements of the entry.

Because I had originally recorded all the audio in .wav format, I needed to convert all the .wav files to .mp3 format for the web.

If you use the Send/Receive function, then normally the audio files will be located at the following place (substituting the name of your own project):

To hold the file names for the new .mp3 files, I created two custom fields -- Audio for Web and Audio for Web Examples.

The configuration for the Dictionary looks like this, with the Audio fields directly after the Headword and the Example:

2.) To upload the audio, you use a special entry to webonary.org via the AjaXplorer interface.  The interface looks like this:

To get the files onto the system, you use the upload button, and then you see an interface like the following:

3.) To convert the .wav to .mp3, I used Audacity.   You can select a group of files in Windows Explorer and drag them onto the Audacity window.  This has the effect of opening them all at once.

Then you can use the File | Export Multiple command to convert bunches of them to .mp3

4.)  The main XHTML output from FLEx needs to be uploaded in Webonary.  After you log in, you go to the Dashboard, then to Tools | Import | SIL FLEx dictionary, where you see a screen like the following:

Here you use the Choose File button to select the XHTML files generated by the Export function of FLEx.

5.) After doing all this, you should get a web page with audio links.  It is necessary to do a certain amount of editing of your webonary dictionary to get the title, menus, etc. to accurately reflect the name of this dictionary project (and not some other Webonary dictionary for a different language).

Here's a picture of the browse screen for entries beginning with m: