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Re: VMs: Interlinear block codes, revised...?

Hi Jorge,

Thanks very much for your comments! :-)

At 22:11 04/09/2003 -0300, Jorge Stolfi wrote: 
Nick, indeed the block IDs (the part of the locator that lies
between the page ID and the line number) were assigned rather
randomly. I know (better than most!) how much trouble that means to
programmers. <--snip-->

When I converted Gabriel's interlinear to EVA, and added the new
material, I tried to maintain some compatibility with previous
versions and with the official EVT format (as accepted by Rene's VTT).
That is why there are line numbers like "0a" or "21b" (which are even
more troublesome to programmers than the random unit IDs).

Because of the above uncertainties, I don't think that we are ready to
assign *the* definitive block and line numbers. If we do a global
renumbering of blocks and lines now, we will surely have to change
them again later. On the other hand, merging two files with very
different line numbers is a lot of hard work. Therefore, I believe
that, at this point, compatibility is more important than consistency.
I vote for preserving the current locators as much as possible.

My current plan is to leave the interlinear in its current state & merely to create a (probably lengthy) Perl script to remap block IDs, for anyone who actually requires them to be useful. Then, if (in future) you decide it would be good for a new release of the interlinear to have the block IDs made more consistent and (programmatically) useful, you can just run the Perl script over it, and (as Jacques would no doubt say, given a chance) voila. :-)

My approach when processing VMS text has been to assume that block IDs
are random strings, which are temporarily mapped to numbers and/or
categories, when needed, through the INDEX table.

I'm building a JavaScript analysis tool with nice understandable buttons (circular text, star label, etc), but the (50+) special case block IDs would make the interface somewhat unwieldy. :-o

  > Also: I'm assuming that TEXT16E6.EVT is the latest version of the
  > interlinear to work from, but does anyone have any updates or
  > corrections they'd like to make to it?

I have many minor corrections, which I have been saving for the long
overdue release 1.6e7. Unfortunately I do not know when I will have
time to do it; certainly not before dec/2003. (For one thing, I have
18 months of mostly-unread VMS mail to go through. Are there any new
transcriptions out there? Glen, Gabriel, Rene...?) In case you can't
wait, here is a tarfile (+gzip) of the contents of my working
directory, as of my last fix.

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/2002-09-15-pre16e7.tgz

Great, thanks - I'll grab that & have a play. :-)

Best regards, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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