Re: tooltips and glossary

[Michael Saunders <odradek5@gmail.com>]

> (Preliminary remark to M.S.: please, please, configure your MUA to
> correctly reply to the current thread!)

(What's wrong with my subject line?  I'm merely hitting "reply" in gmail.)


> No, it's plain English. Unfamiliar phrases are just one consequence of a
> language becoming the world standard. Do you want to flame Italians or
> French for not adhering to the norms of classical Latin? You don't.
> There's no point at all in even mentioning somebody's stylistic
> idiosyncrasies on the internets. Just face it: the world won't adopt
> English as a global means of communication without interfering with its
> norms. If you don't understand something why don't you contact the
> author, his email adress is right there on the first page.

I don't mind non-native speakers using bad grammar, strange usages, or
odd constructions at all.  Things like that are usually no problem for
native speakers to understand, although the two sentences I quoted
were not "plain English" at all---one was completely indecipherable.
The biggest problem with the docs is far more basic---it's the most
basic mistake a beginning writer can make.  I'm sure documents like
the ones I was shown on this thread make perfect sense to their
authors---who already know what they mean---but they fail to
communicate their message to anyone who doesn't already know it.  The
reader isn't being given enough information to decode the message and
what he is given is in no particular order:  it's whatever bits and
pieces of the story the author thinks of in the order he happens to
think of them.

You can't tell the author this.  It makes sense to him and he can't
understand the criticism.  He has to put himself in the place of the
reader who doesn't already know the message.  If he can't do that, he
can't communicate.  I'm sure that these documents would be just as bad
in the native languages of the authors as they are in English.  The
fault is far deeper than bad translation.

Increasingly, I'm wondering whether the problem with Context is just
bad docs or bad language design (it's hard to control, it looks bad
most of the time).  I still don't know.  I'm hoping that Idris's book
will shed light on this.



> I append a snippet that should allow basic glossaries. It doesn't
> provide much functionality (capitalization might have to be implemented
> …) but you may fit it to your needs.
...
>
> (As for the code, it's certainly not context style, I'm aware of that
> but don't have the time to care.)
>
> Awaiting your feedback,

Thank you.  I'm not quite sure what to do with these files (the .lua
file in particular).  Unfortunately, I won't be able to get to them
until tomorrow.

> As for the tooltips, unfortunately
> I don't know how to create them. The functionality would be nice,
> though, as long as no javascript is involved.

It's not done with javascript.  As I understand it, the usual way is
to place an invisible pdf  "forms"-style button over the word you want
to gloss and then set its "short description" feature.   I think
context knows how to make such buttons and to set bounding boxes
around words, so I think it should be possible, no?
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