[cgreek:00344] Re: epsilon, omicron + circumflex

[Robin Smith <rasmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Furley <william.furley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:


    Bill> May I take this opportunity of congratulating you on the
    Bill> implemention of incremental search for greek words in
    Bill> cgreek? Works very well. Now all we need is a search
    Bill> function for the whole TLG disk or selected parts of it and
    Bill> then we would need no other software to read and search the
    Bill> TLG. Could you not link cgreek with grep somehow to permit
    Bill> searches like that?

I must join in thanking Takahashi for all the work he has done, and
continues to do, on cgreek.  I use cgreek on a daily basis, both on my
office machine (FreeBSD) and my laptop (Debian Linux), and I've had no
need of any other TLG-related software for years (and I'm a fairly 
heavy TLG user, both in order to read texts--either because it's just
so easy if you only need to look up a passage or because I don't have
access to a printed copy of the work in question--and to do searches of
various kinds.  It would be completely impossible for me to work as I
do without it.

In response to Bill Furley's question, I did write a primitive utility
to search for word occurrences using the TLG's own index file.  It's
relatively simple: I just parse the index of word forms and use grep
externally to match word forms, then pipe the output into a buffer
where each matching word form displays in Greek.  Each word is then
linked to a call of a second external utility which gets the list of
occurrences of the word in question from the TLG word count index,
either for a particular author or for all authors, returning a list by
author and work; items in the list can be used as links to open the
relevant works.  That's as far as it goes: the TLG word counts index
only contains information on how many times a given word occurs in a
given work, not what the locations of those occurrences are, so you've
got to open the work and search (much easier with Takahashi's
incremental search).  It does, however, save a lot of time, and
sometimes just knowing the word is or isn't there (or how common it
is) is enough.

This is, as I said, a pretty primitive thing.  I've used it under
FreeBSD and several Linux variants.  Since it supposes you've got grep
available, I don't know how hard it would be to port it to Meadow.  It
also has one glaring omission: you can look up occurrences of an
author provided you know that author's TLG author number (e.g. Plato
is 0059, Aristotle is 0086), but I haven't fixed up an interface to
take an author's name and turn it into a number.  Moreover, since the
TLG word index is an index of actual words, you can't directly do
something like looking up all the occurrences of all the forms of
FE/RW (or even all the forms of LU/W).  And when you look for the word
in the text, you have to take account of problems with case and accent
variation and words split by embedded hyphens at line or section
breaks.  On the other hand, using the index has the advantage that
*it* knows about accent changes and line/section breaks, so it will
know about all the occurrences of )AGAQO/N, even those that appear as
)AGAQO\N or )AGA- QO\N or )A*GA- QO\N (though you still have to find
them yourself).  

See http://aristotle.tamu.edu/~rasmith/cgreek-tlgindexutil/ if you're 
interested.  I'm not really sure whether anyone else has used this.


Robin Smith 
Department of Philosophy            rasmith@xxxxxxxx
Texas A&M University                Voice (979) 845-5696
College Station, TX 77843-4237      FAX   (979) 845-0458