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Re: a new Lojban project - for all of you

  From lojbab:

> Can you repost the infor from alt.galactic.guide - not everyone on
> this list has access to the newsgroups, and I for one am trying to
> drop newsgroupsrather than add them.

I have been looking for software to manage all the Lojban material
accumulating from various sources. In the process I also checked
a program called The Guide (TG!, The HitchHiker's Guide to the
Known Galaxy) which is a rather handy article reader originating
from a group of people writing fact/fiction/both articles in the
spirit of the original THGTTKG. It wasn't very suitable for my
original purposes but could be utilized for our Tales-project. (I'll
return to the materials management in a later posting.)

The TG! program is presently available for MS-DOS but there is work
going on to make it available for other platforms (at least UNIX;
unfortunately I have no details about this as the news management
at our site had just purged most of the articles from alt.galactic-
guide)

I prepared a rather condensed doc about TG! from the material still
available in the news group and from the articles accompanying a late
beta version of the program.

I have tried out this version of the program and its seems to be OK.
Of course there are details which I'd have handled differently but
the program is available NOW and the format of the entries is such
that it will be quite easy to convert them to another format later on
if so desired (the articles must be archived in the original ASCII
format for this eventuality).

Without the reader the originals are just ASCII files with a
standardized header and as such accessible to everybody. So we could
adopt the format in lieu of a better one and those of us who have a PC
available could use the TG! reader.


    Veijo

PS. we could try posting articles to this original Guide for
    publicity. (The guide.zip file contains 20+ articles at
    the moment so those of you who are interested enough to
    download it will get the flavour.)


-----
 AUTHOR     : Steven W. Baker  (swbaker@vela.acs.oakland.edu)
 DATE       : 06/07/92
 FACTUALITY : FACT
-----
   The Guide!

  an experiment in Turbo Vision/OOP to implement
  The HitchHiker's Guide to the Known Galaxy

  Pre-Release (ie, beta-test) Documentation
       slightly revised 06/07/92

  (anonymous ftp : vela.acs.oakland.edu:/pub/swbaker/guide.zip)

1.0 Introduction

     This is my "vision" of The Guide!, a PC-based article reader.
     This doc file is just a brief glimpse of what the program
     can do;

     The Guide! is a full-featured, multi-windowed, pop-up and pull-
     down menu'ed, mouse-supporting anomaly.  It reads in new entry
     articles from standard ASCII files, and supports multiple
     entries per .NEW input file (archive).

     TG! features a powerful search and query engine which allows you
     to search in many different ways.  The following are verbose
     examples of searches you may request:

     * Give me all entries which have the word "wazoo" in the title,
       are written by Joe Schmoe, and are completely factual.
     * Show me all entries written between Date1 and Date2.
     * I want any articles with "meatball" in the summary, written
       before Date1, which are both fact and fiction.

     ... and any combination of title, summary, author, date, and
     factuality (being fact, fiction, or both) you can imagine.

     The Guide! also offers a full index, as well as cross-references
     which link articles together.  If an article has a cross-
     reference to a second article which has not yet been added,
     The Guide! is aware of that "incomplete" xref and will update
     it, automatically, when the second article is eventually
     added.

2.0 Adding entries to The Guide!

     The Guide! is designed to be very flexible with its data input.
     It will read in as many new archive files (files which contain
     articles) as you want to throw at it, providing they meet
     these criteria:

       1. Each ASCII file must end with a [ .NEW ] extension, ie:

          FOO.NEW
          BAR.NEW

          This way, whole batches of files may be processed at once,
          following the simple idea that every .NEW file shall be
          added to the system.

       2. Multiple entries may reside in a single ASCII file, but they
          MUST be delimited with this special flag:

          *EOA*

          which means "End Of Article."  This flag must appear in the
          FIRST column of a line, and must be the only item on the
          line.

     Update options and user-interaction are fully supported.  In
     particular, you may:

       1. Automatically accept each and every article found, including
          duplicate articles.  When an article with a title duplicate
          to one already in the GuideNET is added, a special message
          is appended to the new title.  This ", Entry x" message
          denotes that the article is the 2nd, or 3rd, or xth, article
          with the same title.

       2. Automatically accept only new, unique articles, and skip any
          duplicate articles found

       3. Accept new articles, and also automatically update existing
          articles with data from new articles with matching titles

       4. Manually decide whether or not to accept each article found.
          You are shown the new article's title, summary, author,
          date, and factuality.

2.1 Format of new entry files

       Entries in the HHGTTKG have a very specific format to allow for
       easy parsing by third-party readers.

Sample Format:

%t Title
%n identification number
%s summary
%a author
%d date (in yyyymmdd format)
%x xrefs (unlimited number)
%i index (unlimited number)
%e Entry beginning
This is a sample entry.
%e Entry end.

%t Title:  Should not wrap around an 80-column screen, if possible.
           This is the subject title of the entry.

%n ID Number:  This string is composed of three main parts: editor
           ID, reality index, and message ID.  The editor ID is the
           number up until the reality index, and the message ID is
           the number after that.  Every editor will have a unique ID
           number.  The reality index is a single character, either R
           (for Real articles) or U (for Unreal articles). The
           message ID number is in hexidecimal, and may contain chars
           A- F. For example, the 19th real article editor 4 makes
           will have the id number of 4R13.

%s Summary:  Should not wrap around an 80-column screen, if possible.
           This is just a short one-liner about the entry, without
           going into too much detail.

%a Author:  Your name, in straight first-middle-last fashion.  In
           parenthesis, add your email address after your name, so
           that people can figure out who to talk to if they have
           questions

%d Date:  The date you wrote the article.  The fashion is yyyymmdd, so
           December 25, 1991 would be written 19911225.

%x XRefs:  Cross references.  Your entry can contain any number of
           logical cross references.  Each should be on a separate
           line starting with the %x marker.  These lines should
           contain the names of ACTUAL ENTRY TITLES.

%i Indexes:  These are names by which the Title might also be known
           by. Your entry may contain any number of these, so long as
           each is on a separate line marked by the %i marker.

%e Entry Markers:  These indicate the beginning and ends of the
           entries.  These markers should occupy a single line by
           themselves. Everything after the first %e is the entry,
           and the entry is ended by another %e on a separate line.

ENTRY FORMATTING:

       For readability, space considerations, and technical reasons,
       the editors of the Guide ask that your entries be written in a
       specific format.

Tabulation:  The beginning of every paragraph should NOT start with a
       tab.

Paragraph spacing:  There should be an extra blank line between
       paragraphs, but NOT after the final paragraph, which should be
       followed by the %e.

Underlining:  Things that should be underlined (like book names)
       should be preceded by an underscore "_" and then ended with an
       underscore "_", but there should NOT be underscores between
       words.

Hyphenation:  Words should NOT be hyphenated at the end of a line.

     Several extensions have been added to this format, which I
     believe have been mentioned in the newsgroup:

     *    %f [ FACT | FICTION | BOTH ]

     *    %f [ -10 .. 10 ]
        Another suggested way of handling factuality.  These
        are converted as follows:

                    -10..-4 : FICTION
                    -3..3   : BOTH
                    4..10   : FACT

     *    Of course, if the 'U' or 'R' is present in the %n <id
          number> field, then that'll work also ('U' = FICTION, 'R' =
          FACT ).

     Case is not sensitive (ie, you can have either '%t' or '%T').

     Recall that The Guide! uses a special marker [ *EOA* ] to define
     a "break" between articles in an "archive" .NEW file

     The Guide! ignores any non-key lines in the input files.  This
     way, users can simply capture new articles from the newsgroups,
     save them as ASCII files, and let the system handle the rest.
     Comments, remarks, etc may also be inserted before, between, and
     after articles.

2.2 Adding new entries into the system : use UPDATE.EXE

2.3 Duplicate entries, indexs, and cross-references (in UPDATE.EXE)

     TG! allows duplicate entries, indexs, and cross-references.  It
     takes care of all the busywork, and lets you get on with using
     TG!.

     The Guide! distinguishes between original entries and subsequent
     duplicates (if allowed into the system; see 2.0 above) by
     appending the phrase ", Entry x" to the duplicate's title.

     Any index and cross-reference links to duplicate entries access
     that duplicate entry, just as any index and cross-reference
     links to the original entry access that original entry.  From
     the article displayed, you may Browse forward/backward to other
     duplicate entries.

2.4 Saving the data (in UPDATE.EXE)

     The Guide! supports multiple data files, and each file may have a
     50-character description associated with it.  Thus, you may
     maintain several GuideNET files by choosing Manual Control in
     the Update option, and selecting desired articles for each
     collection.

     You defined the GuideNET name and description before the system
     performed the updating process.  If you wish to rename the
     current GuideNET file, you may use the "Save [A]s..." function,
     in the <F>ile pull-down menu, to modify the name and
     description.

3.0 Search and query (in GUIDE.EXE)

     The searching is probably the neatest thing about The Guide!.
     Pull down the <S>earch menu, or use the hot-key F8, to define
     the various search parameters you wish to use.  These parameters
     can even be saved so you may restore them later.

     Note that these parameters are conjunctive; that is, if you
     define a string for specific titles (ie, "Bob") AND a particular
     author string (ie, "Joe"), then the search will return only the
     artitles with "Bob" somewhere in its title AND "Joe" somewhere
     in the author field, not EITHER.  Thus, the more parameters you
     define, the more specific your search becomes!

     The index and cross-references, as well as both forward and
     backward browsing, are accessed through the <C>onsult menu, and
     also through their respective hot-keys.  In addition, "Browse
     backward/forward" buttons are defined on the bottom "status
     line" for you mouse- users.

     The index list, cross-reference list, and search results list
     are shown in "list-boxes".

4.0 Print and save

     You can print and save the active entry (ie, the current on-
     screen article, which is "active" with its window boarder
     highlighted). The output of Print and Save (both accessed from
     the <W>indow menu, and also via hot-keys) is similar to what is
     diaplayed on-screen.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Veijo Vilva       vilva@viikki21.helsinki.fi