Some details of last update

As I mentioned in the last post, I added/activated a couple of new features on CasualConc. One is based on the lemmatizing function and the other is something with Concord.

The first, which is based on the lemmatizing function is keyword grouping or whatever name I will settle (it has a tentative label). What it does is first you prepare a text file (UTF-8) with the same format the lemmatizer accepts. The default is:

keyword -> word,word,word,...

The keyword is a grouping label, so if you want to group days of a week, it looks like:

week -> Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday,Friday,Saturday,Sunday

Once you prepare as many groups you want to have, save the file as a plain text with UTF-8 encoding. Then, go to Preferences on CasualConc -> Lemma, and check Grouped Keywords. Next you select the file you just saved by clicking Select Grouping File button. Now everything is set.

If this works as intended, you should be able to use this function on Concord, Cluster, and Collocation/Cooccurrence. What you will do is add @@ at the beginning of your search word(s). So if you want to search all the days of a week, as specified above, you will @@week, then search. You should be able to search all the words in this group. Technically, you should be able to search multiple groups, but it is not fully tested and might not work, and I don't know what will happen if you combine this feature and wildcard search. I might change the behavior of this feature if I ever get any feedback.

Another somewhat major addition is which is not documented at this time is a function for Concord. You can now open a concordance result in a new window. This might be useful if you want to compare several concordance results. To use this function, search any word(s) in Concord, and then go to Menu -> Misc -> Open Concordance Result in New Window. This is experimental. I added this because I found a way to add multiple window function to a program (I just wanted to have something so that I remember how to do it). You should be able to resort the results even on a new window, just like on the main window. But be ware, if the concordance result is huge (like returned 10000 hits), using this might eats a lot of memory because CasualConc keeps all the info on memory. If you have at least 2GB of memory, this should be less of a problem, though.

Finally, I have something that is not related to CasualConc. I posted a couple of weeks ago that I wrote a simple utility program that helps typing IPA characters. I wrote a similar program(?) with Javascript and added to the IPATypist page. I highly doubt many people read this post and especially people who don't use Leopard, but this is written for those people. It should run on Tiger with Firefox, Safari and Camino. I haven't tested it on IE on Windows and I have no intention to support it, but it might work. It is also available for download, so if you are ever interested, you can download it and use it on your computer or put it on your course site or wherever you want to use it, though I can't guarantee it will work.

As always, if you ever use any of the programs, I'd apprecite your feedback. That will motivate me to improve them.