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Using SOLID to convert to one-ps-per-sense format

Author John Hatton | 27.06.2009 | Category FLEx, Dictionary, Solid

This week saw another colleague here in Papua New Guinea deciding to move his Toolbox dictionary to FLEx.  He had a fair amount of entries like this:

\lx ba
\ps n
\sn 1
\ge brother-in-law
\de brother-in-law: reciprocal term between wife’s father’s brother’s children and father’s brother’s daughter’s husband
\sn 2
\ge brother-in-law
\de brother-in-law: reciprocal term between sister’s husband and wife’s siblings
\sn 3
\ge in-law
\de reciprocal term between father’s sister’s husband and wife’s brother’s child
\dt 18/Sep/2000

These are all nouns, and he identifies this just once, at the top of the entry.  That counts as good MDF.  The problem is, FLEx import doesn’t handle this situation.  In fact, a recent import I did left us with over 60 cases where the \ps was turned into its own sense, followed by all the actual senses which were left with no grammatical category. Neither I nor my colleague caught this until she had already been working in WeSay on the new data for too long to go back and repeat the import. Yuck.

To prevent this, we need to move that \ps down to under the \sn, and then copy it for all remaining senses which lack a \ps.  As of SOLID version 0.9.319, we can now do this:

As with all these quickfixes, I use TortoiseHG (mercurial) so that I can look at exactly what changed, verifying that nothing was messed up. Here’s what quickfix did to the above record, as seen from TortoiseHg’s Commit tool: