Dico |
|
GNU Dictionary Server |
Sergey Poznyakoff |
5.1 Outline
The outline
module supports databases written in
Emacs outline mode. It is not designed for storing large
amounts of data, its purpose rather is to handle small databases that
can be composed easily and quickly using the Emacs editor.
The outline mode is described in Outline Mode in The Emacs Editor. In short, it is a usual plain text file, containing header lines and body lines. Header lines start with one or more stars, the number of starts indicating the nesting level of the heading in the document structure: one star for chapters, two stars for sections, etc. Body lines are anything that is not header lines.
The outline dictionary must have at least a chapter named
‘Dictionary’, which contains the dictionary corpus. Within it, each
section is treated as a dictionary article, its header line giving
the headword, and its body lines supplying the article itself. Apart
from this, two more chapters have special meaning. The
‘Description’ chapter gives a short description to be displayed
on SHOW DB
command, and the ‘Info’ chapter supplies a full
database description for SHOW INFO
output. Both chapters are
optional.
All three reserved chapter names are case-insensitive.
To summarize, the structure of an outline database is:
* Description
line
* Info
text
* Dictionary
** line
text
[any number of entries follows]
As an example of outline format, the GNU Dico package includes Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary in this format, see examples/devdict.out.
The initialization of the outline
module does not require
any command line parameters. To declare a database, supply its full
file name to the database handler
directive, as shown in the
example below:
load-module outline; database { name "devdict"; handler "outline /var/db/devdict.out"; }
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