lisa@phs.UUCP (Jeffrey William Gillette) (08/11/85)
[] Several months ago I announced the availability of the Duke Language Toolkit - a collection of several programs which allow the IBM PC with an Enhanced Graphics Adapter to display foreign alphabets. With the soon arrival of the new academic year, I would like to post a short status report. The current distribution of the Toolkit (v 1.2) allows one to install custom alphabets which replace the PC's ROM character set. Thus we have a Greek word processor (with accents), a Coptic concordance program, a communications program which allows our VM machine's output to be displayed in (unpointed) Hebrew, etc. Software compatibility has been our most pleasant success story. Most applications which allow display of the full 256 IBM characters will run with foreign alphabets unmodified. Included in the Duke Language Toolkit distribution diskette are several programs, patches, and suggestions for using foreign alphabets on the IBM PC. Specifically, we have included Makefont, a generic font editor created at Duke University, Loadfont, a patch into the interrupt 10h vector that loads the custom font, and a few short utilities to turn the custom font on and off. We are also including several alphabets - Greek (with most accents), Coptic, Cyrillic, and a simple Greek/Hebrew font without accents or vowel points. Two successes that have particularly excited us humanists relate to a word processor and a concordance program. PC-Write version 2.5 includes the ability to redefine the keyboard, and an "accent" key. With a small patch to PC-Write, we can define Greek accents, Coptic supralinear strokes, or whatever. [Note, we are not allowed to distribute a modified version of PC-Write, but we can send the patch with simple directions for others to make the modification.] Another interesting program that appeared this summer is the Brigham Young Concordance. The BYU program allows one to take a literary text, concord it, and interactively probe it for occurrences of words, combinations of words, patterns of themes, etc. This is a real tool for humanist scholars, and works as well (with the Duke Toolkit) for the Greek Gospels and Coptic Nag Hammadi as for English texts! The Duke Language Toolkit (v 1.2) does require an Enhanced Graphics Adapter with a monochrome monitor (theoretically an enhanced color monitor will also work, but we have not tested this configuration). I am authorized by the Humanities Computing Project at Duke to make this diskette available free of charge to anyone interested. Note, however, that this program does not yet support printed output (you are on your own for that), and is not in any respect a "Macintosh" like interface for the PC. To receive a copy of the Duke Language Toolkit, send a blank diskette with a stamped self-addressed mailer to me at the following address. If you want PC-Write2.5 (Bob Wallace's "shareware" word processor), send an additional diskette. Information abouttThe BYU Concordance is available from Randy Jones, Humanities Research Center, JKHB, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602. Jeffrey William Gillette uucp: ...!duke!phys!lisa The Divinity School bitnet: DYBBUK@TUCCVM Duke University Durham, NC 27706