Re: Latest files

pps glossary project (pps@crystal.desy.de)
Tue, 14 Feb 1995 11:48:47 +0100 (MET)

On Tue, 14 Feb 1995, Murray-Rust Dr P wrote:
>
> My thinking is now something like:
>
> /glossary/v2.4/chemical/compound.molwt
> /glossary/bio/organism.latin # current glossary implied
> /glossary/comp/lang/tcl.llength # follows newsgroup namespace
>
>
I think this is a very good approach to a universal glossary system with
as few overlays as possible.
Although it is far more than our proteinstruct.glossary we have to set
the fundaments for future development of glossaries now.

I agree with Peter, when he says
> I think that we shall prepare proteinstruct as a *local*
> dictionary for our own use. As we add terms it may fission, but we may
> also create valuable external dictionaries. Therefore we might keep
> organism in proteinstruct until there get to be too many when it will
> form a separate one.

I see no need to subdivide the glossary at this stage. We are going to a
standalone system and we don't have the problem of overlaps at the
moment. If we transfer the glossary into a biological gloss, where
prot.struct would be only a subset, then a review of the incorporated
terms is inevitable, but not before.

>Lesley said:
> > As a curator, it's pretty frustrating not to edit the contents easily. I've
> > had several emails asking me to edit files so I know you also want to edit
> > contents. Do you have any suggestions for easy editing?
>
>PMR: The *.glo* files *are* editable (with care) with a text editor.
> The only additional thing I could do would be to build a form. I don't
> have time for that, and in any case will try to move on to SGML.

With the change to the *.glo files the frustration has gone.
I edited the *.glo files with emacs and it worked very well. :-)
(Only frustrating is editing via Net Hamburg-London with LAAAAGGGSSS :-/

One Q to PMR remains for me, what fields are currently supported by the
makeindex command.
I added -just as a test to see what happens- a new field
{glossary.nonsense{
the current nonsense is blabla
}}
and it was (as expected) skipped luckily without failing to index.
So the makeindex seems to be robust :-)

So the 2 Qs:
What's the current set of fields that is recognized by the makeindex?
And: Can they be introduced/deleted later (my guess, and hope is YES)?

Thanks
Stefan for the PPS glossary team