[conlang_learners] Presenting a dictionary online?

[Jim Henry]

2009/7/9 Dayle Hill <dwhmusic32 at yahoo.co.uk>:
> Can anyone tell me ways in which I can present my dictionary online? I've
> considered creating a PDF...but not too sure about it. To present it in
> Frathwiki is not really an option considering it has between 5000 and 7000
> entries; typing and formatting all that is not an economical use of my time.
> I really want to find a way of simply copying and pasting from my dictionary
> document, which is currently in Microsoft Word 2007. Any suggestions?

What about copy and paste a few dictionary entries into an email
message so we can see how it's formatted?   If the formatting is
consistent enough, you can save it as a text file, run it through a
custom script to turn it into an XML or tab-delimited database, and
then process it in various ways with other tools.

My gzb dictionary's primary format is a tab-delimited text file; I
process it with a Perl script to turn it into the HTML dictionaries on
my website.

You could of course save your Word dictionary document as an HTML file
and then upload that to a website; but I wouldn't recommend it --
Microsoft Office programs tend to create crufty, bloated,
non-standards-compliant HTML that only displays correctly in Internet
Explorer.   There are programs out there that can supposedly clean up
the messy HTML that Word outputs, but last time I tried using one it
didn't work very well.  Importing the Word document to OpenOffice and
then exporting as HTML might work better; I haven't tried that yet.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/