Archive for the ‘Welsh’ category

Klebran released at last!

February 16th, 2007

I’ve finally announced the release of Klebran. In October last year I was trying to think of a way of using the Welsh port of Gramadóir in some sort of GUI, because I just find it really difficult to use something at the terminal only. I think it must be because it makes me think about things serially, whereas I prefer to get more of a multi-faceted view of things. Anyway, I couldn’t find any tame C++ programmers, so I began to wonder about doing something in PHP. Hmm, probably won’t work, I thought – but I wrote a page to print output from Gramadóir to the browser, and (to my surprise) within a day I had something working.

That was the easy bit – the last 4 months have been down to improving it, and there are still lots of things that are not done “properly”. I’m sure the code could be improved, and I still think I’m not using AJAX properly! I originally used the –api switch on Gramadóir, but Kevin Scannell pointed out that using the –xml switch would give me a lot more of the info I use to do the neat mouseovers giving you meanings (from Eurfa) and part-of-speech info. The Elixir grammar-checking backend for Sonnet in KDE4 will use the –api output, though.

There are still improvements to be made in the Gramadóir port, particularly as regards disambiguation. For example, if you get a verb-form that is tagged as two separate parts-of-speech (eg gweler, newch), both forms will appear in the Gramadóir output, and the Klebran code will just ignore them as it does its regexing, so you get a space where the word should be!

But at least it’s a start – it’s surprising how many typos Klebran picks up even in text that has been eyeball-checked a couple of times, and I am pretty good at spotting typos. The next step is to combine Klebran with an importer for PO-files, so that I can take completed files and check they are using “standard” words, aren’t producing obvious typos, and so on. I’ll probably use the import part of Kartouche for that, suitably amended.