mwh wrote:The errors are trivial and obvious, so shouldn’t throw anyone off or significantly impede reading.
Trivial and obvious in reading, yes, because as human readers we have commonsense - the ability to understand by intellect, rather than mere sensory input. For a computer however...
jeidsath wrote:The breathing can come after the letter in betacode. ... that beta code should still be parsed (and is in combining mode).
Display and parsing are two issues that seem to work okay within the constraints, foibles and limitations we have been discussing, but the integrity of a search is another. In the present order, viz.
they don't show up in search results (regardless of which display preference is used) where is search terms are the uncapitalised
. The search routine seems to have been written within stricter parameters than the parsing one, and it has demonstrable "limitations" when it comes to capitalised forms.
The search routine has 3 "interesting" features, so far I can oresently identify.
The first is that when
a search is made for a capitalised form, such as in Xenophon, Memorabilia for the proper name,
The results are not localised / truncated to just a few lines, but great swaths of text are returned.
Secondly, the "results" of the search are not highlighted, as they are in other searches for non-capitalised forms.
Those 2 things are not good, but can be accommodated by people like us, who have developed skimming skills in Greek on par with their own language of education. For somebody, however, who plods through a text word by word or phrase by phrase using grammar and dictionary, trying to get (full) comprehension from the Greek, that might be troublesome and disheartening.
Thirdly, when choosing the (default) "expand" option during a search if capitalised forms, the search actually doesn't expand the search to the other declensional cases. A user without an adequately fostered sense of scepticism will be confident as they look through the results. For capitalised forms, the search needs to be repeated for each declensional form, in order to perform a comprehensive search for the "word" rather than the "form".
That third point also "holds" (in so far as the search is concerned "breaks down") for other words too. The capitalised and correctly accented
to be found at 2.1 and 3.1 of Galen, does not show up in a search for the capitalised and incorrectly accented (but perhaps faithful reproduction of the typset form of the text)
that occurs at 1.12. Furthermore, neither of those 3 instances of two capitalised forms shows up in the 26 results returned from a standard search for
In fact it is
not possible to search for
in Xenophon by using the non-capitalised sequence
as that will simply return a message saying that no results were found.
Beyond the triviality and obvious nature of these things, there are issues here involving the accuracy of the Beta Code and of the un-tested coding for the search engine(s?).