Diogenes is actually an interface to the TLG — that part of it will be useless to most of us , given the cost of the TLG. The newest release, however, comes with the big Latin and Greek (LSJ) dictionaries Perseus offers. Simply select “Look up word” from the front page, and enter Unicode for Greek or plain old text for Latin.
It does not include any texts, so it’s just a very snazzy dictionary. I’m sure going to be using it a lot.
It’s about 500M (Mac version — I expect the others to be comparable) so clean that music you never listen to any more from your hard drive.
Do the dictionaries come with the program or are they accessed online? I have been toying with an idea of making something like that. Mine wouldn’t be a 500 mb download, though
Thanks for pointing that out. So far it’s been extremely useful, especially since my backup to perseus (http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/pollux/) seems to be down and that didn’t accept unicode anyway and didn’t know how to ignore accents. And now I don’t need to be online to check words. Maybe a bit big but very nice overall.
Talk to your local Perl nutjob. In this particular case, that would be me.
I have altered the application a bit to make morphological parsing one of the menu items in the “Action” selection. I’m going to see if I can get the Diogenes author to include it in his standard release.
Ooh, lest anyone get the wrong impression, I must confess — I am a Perl apostate, and have been for some time. But there’s so much of the stuff I still have to handle it regularly.
Wow, that would be incredible! It’s the parsing functionality that sends me to Perseus more than anything. A tool that did nothing but that plus LSJ-lookups would be an awesome and sought-after stand-alone application, I would think.
And let me beat Nathan (ndansmith) to the punch – this is one of the really great things about Free Software.
Kudos also to Perseus for releasing all of that morphological data as well its digitization of the lexicons under Creative Commons. Maybe some other applications will start to pop up, too.
I don’t know exactly what you would do to run it from a CD. The whole thing installed, though, is almost exactly 500 MB, so even together it should fit on a CD. The overwhelming bulk of that space (450 MB) is used by a directory called “Perseus_Data,” which contains a handful of very large files, most of which are clearly labeled latin or greek, so it would be easy to at least try to delete out the Perseus data for one language or the other and see if things still work.
In that same directory, the file labeled “gcide.txt” appears to be the 1913 English dictionary, so you could try to delete that if you really want to save to 38MB or so it uses.
I have to say I am loving this program. It also comes with a server, which I set up on a local machine. I then made a little firefox “searchengine” box for my browser. Now I can open any file or webpage in firefox. I can right-cllick on any word and there’s automatically an option to do a morphological search on Diogenes, which will open instantly in another tab. I’m working on book II of the Iliad and tried it out by opening a .txt version of the book in Firefox. It’s unbelievable how fast this all is.
If you decide to setup and run the server, you can easily make the little search box by going to the directory with your firefox profile information and making a little file called diogenes.xml that simply contains the following:
and just replace “http://192.168.0.100:8888/Diogenes.cgi” up there with whatever server and port you use for the server (you can even use localhost if you set the server up on the same computer that you will be reading texts on).
You will then have a “Diogenes” option for your search box (where currently you probably have Google, Yahoo, etc.)
I once had it set up like this to do searches on Perseus, but it was so slow that it was almost pointless. Also, Perseus uses different links for latin vs. greek searches, while Diogenes is smart enough to figure out which, so you only need one search engine. Perseus also doesn’t handle unicode input well (if at all) while Diogenes handles it perfectly.
That last part of the path will be different for everyone. In that create the directory “searchplugins” (no spaces or quotes). Put the XML file into that, and restart.
I will add, for anyone scared off by this, that simply starting Diogenes
starts the server, which it runs in the background. Display is handled
by the Mozilla project XULRunner. Just start up Diogenes and minimize
it to use it with Firefox on the same machine.
In that same directory, the file labeled “gcide.txt” appears to be the 1913 English dictionary, so you could try to delete that if you really want to save to 38MB or so it uses.
Well thanks for the tip. Anyhoo, to risk program stablity (or some other ungodly oversight), saving 38 megs indirectly isn’t attractive.
I hope there’s an option to avoid installing the English dictionary.