[Athens-pm] [Fwd: RFC greeklish]

[Mark Pors]

Hi all,

I had a good time yesterday, I hope the same counts for you.
We even made some decisions:

- from now on we will meet each 2nd Wednesday of the month, so the next 
meeting will be on 13 November. Time and location will be announced on 
the list. If there's anyone that wants to write a piece of code that 
calculates the date of the next meeting, please do, I'll include it in 
the frontpage.

- we will start a small programming project together: a greek-greeklish 
convertor. See the e-mails below for some first thoughts about this. 
Please give your opinion about it (on this list). I think 
specification-by-mailinglist should be possible :-)

- to improve communication during the development a chat channel will be 
set up. IRC and a private channel were mentioned. Who can set up 
something like that?


Cheers
Mark


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RFC greeklish
Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 00:15:29 +0300
From: Mark Pors <mark at dreamzpace.com>
To: nacos at eureka.edu.gr, Konstantinos Prbezas 
<konstantinos_x at hotmail.com>,   mark at dreamzpace.com

Hi,

A first attempt for a spec for our greek-greeklish convertor.

The basic functionallity:
- main page has an input box, where the user can type a text in greek
(with greek fonts).
- after submitting this, the text is checked: are this greek fonts? if
so: translate it to our default greeklish (if no cookie is found) and
print it

Options:
- the user can select one of a couple of predefined greeklishs'
- we remember the selected greeklish and store it in the db, with a
reference to a cookie id (that we store on the users' browser).
- the user can also set some detailled preferences for some specific
characters or sequences. E.g. thita can be 'th', 8, 3, ....?
- these preferences are also stored into the db and have a ref. to a
cookie value.

Extra's:
- we make statistics from the preferences and propose an average/default
greeklish
- top 10 for each character, etc.
- e-mail interface, send in greek, recieve it back in greeklish


Proposal for database definition:
user - id,name,type('visitor','profile'),cookie_id
profile - id, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc.
xref - uid,pid

So the user table holds the different users and also our defaults.
The profile table is a lookup table from a greek character into a
greeklish one, where each value has a default (because we don't want to
define the 'mi' all the time because we all use 'm')
The xref table relates a user to a profile.

shoot!

Mark



Dear Mark,

I like the approach, which is pretty close to what we discussed in 
Xartes (ah, greeklish!). Most things you mention concern the user 
interface, is this what you'd like to work on? I'll do a bit of research 
for character conversions in perl, i still think we should come up with 
a module. Then we could do things such as:

use Greeklish;
my $filter = new Greeklish;
$filter->configure(-action =>'gr2en', -style =>'default');
$blob_gr = "???? ???";
$blog_en = $filter->do($blob_gr);
print $blob_en;
# resulting in "Geia sas" or whatever the -style attribute
# dictates.

what do you think?

Michael