Adding Cross-references

Figure 14: Related cross-referenced articles ‘to and from’ are shown in the Preview Area, here for a bilingual Kiswahili – English dictionary [Data online at: http://africanlanguages.com/kdp/]

In this example, the article for “mwanafunzi” contains two cross-references, one to “mwana” homonym number 1, and a second one to “-funza”. The articles for both of these are shown, in that order, under the section labelled “Article has cross-references to >>”. From the section with the heading “>> Article is cross-referenced from” one also sees that the article “wanafunzi” contains a cross-reference to “mwanafunzi”. Especially the latter type is highly revealing. Further note that the reference markers with which the reference relations are being established (“Roots” and “See singular”) are meaningful text segments. These markers are being selected from a drop down list when establishing the cross-reference relations, as shown in the next section. Note that it is also possible to hide the outgoing and incoming cross-referenced articles, by toggling the status of the “Show related cross-references” checkbox under “Format (F4)”.

Adding Cross-references

To create cross-references in TLex, one uses the special “References” element. Each “References” element can hold multiple cross-references. By default, the “References” element can be added either to “Lemma” elements, or to “Sense” elements (in cases where the cross-reference should only belong to particular word senses). To add cross-references, right-click on the “Lemma” element or on a “Sense” element in the Tree View and select “Add: References”. A “References” element will be added, and the cross-reference editor dialog (shown below) will appear. This dialog allows you to add cross-references to lemmas, or to particular senses within lemmas, by selecting them from a list of all the current lemmas and senses in the dictionary database. It is thus important to realise that cross-references are never typed in manually. The reference position is defined by the place in the Tree View where one called up the cross-reference editor. The reference address(es) is/are chosen using the “Quick-search box”, “Lemma list” and “Senses of selected lemma” sections of the cross-reference editor. The reference marker, finally, is chosen from the drop down menu indicated by “Cross-reference type selection”. When cross-references to several items are made, all are shown in the sub-window labelled “Crossreferences”. The order of these can be changed using the “Move up” and “Move down” buttons –see “Cross-reference order modification”. A preview of the resulting article, together with the linked article(s) is shown in the “Cross-reference article preview”. If one wants to make a cross-reference to an item that has not as yet been treated in the dictionary, then one will typically create the lemma sign of that item first and mark the (empty) article as incomplete. This way the item becomes available in the cross-reference editor, and one can then fill in the contents at a later stage.