xlit 2.3 review

xlit is a program for transliterating text, that is, for converting text from one writing system into another

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 2604K Developer: Bill Poser

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xlit is a program for transliterating text, that is, for converting text from one writing system into another.

This makes it suitable for use for dealing with non-standard transliteration, such as those often necessary between the language notes made by a missionary, trader, or other amateur and technical linguistic notation, or between linguistic notation and a practical writing system.

xlit also provides some advanced facilities not found in typical transliteration and encoding conversion programs. It is often necessary to restrict transliteration to particular parts of the text. xlit understands a variety of delimiters and if so instructed will transliterate only the regions enclosed by the specified delimiters or only their complements.

xlit input and output is in UTF-8 Unicode. At present, it is limited to the Basic Monolingual Plane (the first 16 bits) because the language in which it is written, Tcl/Tk, only supports the BMP. Once Tcl/Tk supports full Unicode, so will xlit.

A number of tools are provided to facilitate the development of transliterations. There are popup windows for entering International Phonetic Alphabet characters and other phonetic notation and a widget for entering Unicode characters by codepoint where necessary. A variety of tools are provided for search and movement within the various windows.

In some situations it is desirable to present a transliteration together with the original version rather than replacing the original with the transliteration. xlit can be configured to do this. The user may choose whether the untransliterated copy precedes or follows the transliteration and how, if at all, the untransliterated copy should be delimited.

What's New in This Release:
Configuration files that load plugins now work properly with the GUI.
Configuration files generated by xlit's Save Configuration command no longer trigger errors when read in batch mode.
The popup for inserting accented letters has been improved, with more characters and upper case versions of the letters available.