I will keep this thread going by asking other questions and making suggestions and comments:
1. Emphasis Tag. I've noticed that {em} tag is hardly seen on the screen. I understand it makes letters bold but somehow they are almost indistinguishable from normal letters. I wonder if {em} could instead make the tagged text a different color to make it stand out. I am using this tag for showing accent in the words. BTW, if the full text search is implemented, will the {de} tags within the word break the search? Any other useful tags that can work for showing word accent (stress)?
2. Ways to Show Word Accent/Stress. As indicated earlier, I use {em} tags to show word stress in the words in the translation portion. This seems somewhat awkward now but it works for the translation portion. How can I show word accent for words for the keywords without ruining the search mechanism? One solution that might work (I am not sure though) -- I could probably use the Unicode stress symbol (I think there is a special symbol in Unicode for word accent) and put it in the ignore char list. Will this work? For example, if the keyword is "a'rmy" (showing stress on A) will the search for "army" locate the keyword if I use the above described approach?
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Just several comments to my earlier notes.
Emphasis Tag. Emphasis {em} tag works. The problem of it not showing was somehow connected to the size of the font I used. I decreased the size of the font and the emphasis started to show.
Showing Word Accent I am still struggling with this. The proper way would be to use "combining diacritical marks" from Unicode standard (see [a href=\"http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf)]http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf)[/url]. 0301 looks like the one I would like to use (however, 02c8 or 02b9 could potentially be also used, I guess). However, it turns out that a lot of programs cannot combine these marks with other glyphs. Microsoft Word kind of works but still it is a problem. I have not tested whether Zbedic supports this because I have hard time creating a test dictionary with these marks. In the perfect world, these combining diacritical marks would combine with a preceding glyph to form one character for displaying purposes. I would then only list the main character in the char-precedence while putting the diacritical mark 0301 into ignore list. This way I could see the stress of all words (not just in transcription) but the word stress would be ingnored for searching purposes. Does this make sense? Anyone has any ideas or suggestions?
{ph} tag? I have just noticed a {ph} tag. I don't see a description of this tag other than that it is somehow used for "description" field. What is it supposed to do? What are the suggestions for its use? If nobody knows for sure, I will try it and report back.
One other question. Will the old linux bedic program (qbedic?) work with the files created by mkbedic (by ignoring the new features) or will it fail to open the new dictionaries? Again, I will try to test this. I feat that it will fail and we will have to wait for a zbedic port to linux.
RAFM, do you have plans for zbedic to go in parallel with TEI XML (making it easy to convert between the two)? Is TEI XML something worth learning?
I presume that there could be new tags in the future. Is it possible for Zbedic to ignore all tags that it does not yet know (for example, {bla}, {/bla})? This way I could put some placeholding tags into my dictionaries for the future and then one day hope that the new tags will be implemented. In the meantime, the dictionaries could be used as is. Mostly, these tags would deal with grammatical categories or wordforms, etc.
Otherwise, I am moving along and getting better with using zbedic format.
