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[O] Keeping an advanced dictionary in Org-mode?


From: Christian Moe
Subject: [O] Keeping an advanced dictionary in Org-mode?
Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:38:49 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10

Hi,

Is anybody using Org-mode to build an advanced dictionary with sub-entries, tags etc.? Would you be willing to share a setup?

For example, the obvious way to build a dictionary would be to use a dictionary list (I borrow a few English-French lines from the wonderful WordReference.com site):

- pine ::
  (/paɪn/)
  1. /m noun/ [bot.] pin; *stripped ~* pin décapé.
  2. /intr verb/ languir (*for* après; *to do* de faire)

This looks nice, but unfortunately, you cannot set tags or properties on dictionary terms, so it's not particularly amenable to fancy searching, mapping etc.

On the other hand, you could do something like this:

* pine
  :PROPERTIES:
  :Pronunciation: /paɪn/
  :END:
** pin                                  :bot:
   :PROPERTIES:
   :Word_class: noun
   :Gender:   m
   :END:                                                        
   *stripped ~* pin décapé.
** languir
   :PROPERTIES:
   :Word_class: verb
   :Transitivity: intr
   :END:
   (*for* après; *to do* de faire)

It's a pain to do, and because of outline folding, it could be a pain to look up meanings, and you might need to do some serious post-processing on the export to make it look anything like a dictionary. But when you're done, you could extract a list of all botanical terms (:bot:), or of words and pronunciations only... etc.

So for my growing pile of translation notes, I might like to keep that kind of thing. But there are so many ways it could be organized - what do you put in subheadings? what in entry text below subheadings? what in tags, what in properties? etc. So if someone has an example that works for them, I'd like to see one.

(Org may not be the best tool for this job, of course, but it's the right tool for me...)

Yours,
Christian




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