lane@CAMIS.STANFORD.EDU (Christopher Lane) (04/24/91)
As is well-known, under 2.0, programmatic access to Webster is missing by
default. You can obtain the necessary files ('text' and 'btree') by asking
NeXT technical support (nicely). However, as is also well-known, thesaurus
access won't work. Also, mapping over the entire dictionary word by word
won't work either (usually stops in 'e' somewhere). We need both thesaurus
access and the ability to map over the entire dictionary word by word so we
came up with the following solution.
The basic idea is to splice the 1.0 version of the Webster files into the 2.0
Webster directory. There are surprisingly few name conflicts and those that
do don't matter (i.e. the 1.0 version isn't needed for this purpose).
Specifically:
mkdir /LocalLibrary/References
cd /LocalLibrary/References
mkdir Webster-{Dictionary,Thesaurus}
cd Webster-Thesaurus
ln -s /NextLibrary/References/Webster-Thesaurus/Thesaurus.nxbf
cd ../Webster-Dictionary
ln -s /NextLibrary/References/Webster-Dictionary/* .
Copy the 1.0 files /NextLibrary/References/Webster-Thesaurus/{index,source}
to /LocalLibrary/Reference/Webster-Thesaurus.
Copy the 1.0 files
/NextLibrary/References/Webster-Dictionary/{full-index,index,source}
to /LocalLibrary/References/Webster-Dictionary.
Copy the 1.0 file /usr/lib/libtext.a to /usr/local/lib/liboldtext.a (you may
need to 'ranlib' it if you don't use 'tar').
Copy the 1.0 directory /usr/include/text to /usr/local/include/oldtext.
To use the 'old' version of Webster that works, you can
'#include <oldtext/Webster.h>' and link with 'liboldtext' in your Makefile.
The name change (i.e. 'old') allows you to continue to use the new (broken)
version, as well, assuming you have a 2.0 version of 'text' and 'btree'. In
theory, you could just use the 1.0 versions and not bother with the 'old' name
change but since libtext provides other utilities (e.g. pathutil, strutil), I
prefer to keep them separate and use the newer one when possible.
With this arrangement, applications like /NextApps/Webster will continue to
use the 2.0 version of the dictionary files.
Yes, this is a kludge--it is the only solution I'm aware of (I asked NeXT
about the Webster bugs but received no response) to get full, working
programmatic access to Webster under 2.0 until NeXT fixes the problems. We've
been using this fix for several weeks without trouble and it has allowed us to
finally upgrade our last 1.0 machine to 2.0.
The 'cost' of doing this is about 42MB.
- Christopher