[Biblical-languages] Text processing of Greek in a large batch offiles

Matthew Brook O'Donnell matt at opentext.org
Thu Sep 4 15:17:20 EDT 2003


Rod

(1) You may want to think about moving over to using HTML + CSS in your
WebCT pages. I'm pretty sure that the latest versions of WebCT support and
encourage this
(http://www2.umist.ac.uk/isd/e-learning/webct/organizer/styles.htm).

So your <font face="Galilee">abc</font> would be changed to <span
class="grk">abc</span>

and you could have a CSS rule like

.grk { font-family: Galilee; font-size: 12pt }

this would allow you to experiment with appropriate font sizes. And overall
it provides much more control and consistency for presentation.

I would think this would work with the text files that are used for quizzes
as well.

(2) There are a number of ways to accomplish the batch substitution and
everyone will probably have different ideas on the best way to do it. A
simple PERL script that would churn through the files in a directory and
apply a regular expression substitution would work. Installing PERL on
Windows is pretty painless and if you contact me off list I'd be happy to
help you.

Best Wishes

Matt O'Donnell



> -----Original Message-----
> From: biblical-languages-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:biblical-languages-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of
> biblang at ntresources.com
> Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 1:46 PM
> To: biblical-languages at lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: [Biblical-languages] Text processing of Greek in a large batch
> offiles
>
>
> This question is not a directly related to our usual concerns, but it is
> directly related to handling Greek text in a series of files.
> Please excuse
> the long explanation.
>
> I teach several classes which are either resident classes
> supplemented with
> web resources or totally Internet courses. To do so, we use the
> WebCT course
> delivery software. We upgraded to a new version of WebCT this summer which
> in many ways was a major improvement. But however WebCT processes and
> displays text, it forces the browser to use a much smaller font than
> normal--and the user (either teacher or student) cannot control
> this sizing.
> The result is Greek text that is too small to be legible on screen. E.g.,
> the difference between an omicron and a (medial) sigma is *one
> pixel*! That
> is not good, especially for beginning students.
>
> Where this causes me the biggest problem is the quiz system. It's not fair
> to students to cause this level of frustration when taking quizzes. WebCT
> stores each quiz question (and I have over a 1,000 of them total) in a
> separate text file. (These are not html files, but they include html tags;
> WebCT inserts the data from the text file into an html file as needed.)
>
> One possible solution is to specify the size using the <font size
> = "x"> tag
> (or a <big> tag). But that means manually changing well over 1,000 text
> files.
>
> Can anyone point me to a Windows program/utility that would enable me to
> automate this process? It would have to be able to automatically step
> through each file in a given directory and do a search and replace of a
> given text string. (And please remember that I'm not a
> programmer! I suspect
> that a programmer or Unix guru could accomplish this without too
> much fuss,
> but I don't have the knowledge to do so or the resources to draw on.)
>
> It would need to do something like this:
>
> Open the first file > find the string: <font face = "Galilee">
> and then replace it with <font face = "Galilee" size = "3">
> Save the file, close it, then open the next file and repeat.
>
> I use Win XP and XP version of Office, and I wouldn't be
> surprised but that
> the macro capabilities of Word/Office could so something like
> this, but I've
> no idea how to go about it.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
> Rodney J. Decker, Th.D., Assoc. Professor/NT
> Baptist Bible Seminary, Clarks Summit, PA, USA
> URL: www.NTResources.com
> PURL: purl.oclc.org/NT_Resources/
> Email: <rdecker> at <NTResources.com>
> = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
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