**This is an old revision of the document!** ----
(Still needs cleaning) ====== Appendix B: Technical information on the sign description file ====== Beware: technically explicit content. Pure souls, avert your eyes. A more user friendly system has been created. Alternatively, you may directly edit your file description file. You need some kind of simple editor to do this : The notepad might do on windows, and softwares like TextWrangler can be used on Mac OS X. XML files are made of plain text. JSesh won't accept badly formed files, so you may find yourself unable to launch JSesh. If this is the case, either correct signs_definition.xml, or rename it to something else, so that it will be ignored. In the future, I will add a user friendly editor, but I won't do it until the format is completely defined. The file must have the following form: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE signs PUBLIC "-//ORG/QENHERKHOPESHEF//DTD SIGNDESCRIPTION 1.0" "sign_description.dtd"> <signs> <!-- here your signs definitions --> </signs> It is important to have exactly this content, specially the DOCTYPE line. Here is a small example (actually, a part of JSesh standard sign description file). This file describes signs C1 and C1A. You see that they are classified in a number of categories. They are both human-headed deities and seated characters. The translitteration of C1 is given. We have provided one for C1A as well. The code "relevance='1'" means that this translitteration is here only for informationnal purporses. Actually, the XML format has been prepared to accomodate a lot of different data, which is not really used yet by JSesh, and I am very interested in getting suggestions about it. The definition for the format (its "dtd") is given just after this appendix. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE signs PUBLIC "-//ORG/QENHERKHOPESHEF//DTD SIGNDESCRIPTION 1.0" "sign_description.dtd"> <signs> <!-- As C is the most complete part of JSesh fonts now, we try to cover it fully. --> <tagCategory tag="human-headed deity" label="human-headed deity"/> <tagCategory tag="hawk-headed deity" label="hawk-headed deity"/> <tagCategory tag="ibis-headed deity" label="ibis-headed deity"/> <tagCategory tag="ram-headed deity" label="ram-headed deity"/> <sign sign="C1"> <hasTranslitteration sign="C1" translitteration="ra"/> <hasTag tag="human-headed deity"/> <hasTag tag="seated"/> <contains partCode="N6"/> </sign> <sign sign="C1A"> <similarTo baseSign="C1"/> <hasTranslitteration translitteration="ra" relevance="1"/> <hasTag tag="human-headed deity"/> <hasTag tag="seated"/> <contains partCode="N6"/> <contains partCode="S40"/> </sign> </signs> Note that tags must be defined before they are used (as tagCategory). A tag has a name and a label ; it is indeed possible to define labels in multiple languages, although this is not really used by JSesh now. Sign description DTD
