SNS-Greek & Latin

Main features of the Macintosh version

SNS-Greek&Latin 6.0 is an application for Mac OS X (10.3.9 or higher). It allows the user to search for the following data banks on CD-ROMs (encoded in the so-called Betaform ):

· Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) version 'E' by University of Irvine, California. It contains ancient Greek texts ranging from Homer to the authors in the fifteenth century A.D.

· PHI #5.3 and PHI #7 by Packard Humanities Institute. PHI #5.3 contains classic Latin texts. PHI #7 contains Greek documentary papyri and inscriptions.

Searching features

SNS-Greek&Latin 6.0 allows the user to open more windows at the same time so that more searches (for one or more sequences of characters) in parallel can be performed on the aforementioned data banks. The user can connect the sequences by means of some logic operators: and, ord and, or and except (negation).

The user can also write the sequences by making use of some special characters: word beginning, word end, either a single or any number of unspecified characters (e.g., in searching papyri) or a character set (i.e., a character chosen among the ones in the specified character set). Furthermore, the search can be case sensitive and ignore punctuation and blank spaces.
It is also possible to specify the alphabet for the current window which allows to search for Latin sequences in Greek texts and viceversa.
The search results are displayed as soon as they are retrieved and within a number of context lines chosen by the user. At any time the user can switch from the context to the entire text.

The search can be performed on the whole CD-ROM or on a set of works chosen by the user.

In the TLG CD-ROM, the user can specify the authors and works by name or number and, moreover, by literary genre, geographic area, epithet, date or edition.

The selection for authors and works can be also performed through an alphabetically sorted list or in chronological order.

Search speed in the TLG

Version 6.0 can achieve a considerable searching speed when treating all the texts contained in CD-ROM Thesaurus Linguae Graecae by means of the SNS-E indexes created in our LILA Laboratory. These indexes contain more data than the ones in the TLG and so they give full information to the user in very short time.
The index files take about on 840 megabytes on the hard disk and they can be purchased separately.

Exporting features

The search results can be saved inside the application or exported in two common formats:

· RTF (Rich Text Format), which produces documents that can be imported by Microsoft Word.
· OT (Only Text), which is used in databases such as File Maker.

Beside exporting all the cases, the user can export either the case which is currently on the screen or a number of cases selected by means of checkboxes.

The user can export the search results in Microsoft Word in an enriched format. All the codes in the citation level referring to the author and work are decoded and the edition is always given. This way the user can avoid to use the Canon for each found case in order to decode the corresponding citation.

For Greek texts the user can choose any Unicode font including the "Greek and Coptic" and the "Greek extended" ranges or any font in the LaserGreek or the LaserGreek II package distributed by the Linguist's Software. Text samples in the different fonts may be seen at http://linguistsoftware.com/lgk.htm.
Greek texts can also be displayed and exported in the Athenian font.

LaserCoptic by Linguist's Software is used to display Coptic texts. Text samples in the LaserCoptic fonts may be seen at http://linguistsoftware.com/lcop.htm.

The user can also extract the content of the works stored in the CD-ROMs and obtain some files in RTF.

Browser
The Browser window allows both to open all the text in each data bank and to retrieve precise citations or passages in a work in a very simple manner .

Indexes and Concordances
It is possible to create indexes and concordances of the single works in the aforementioned CD-ROMs (or, of all the works written by an author in order to obtain a single index or concordance). After the indexing process, the user can export the results in either RTF or OT format, with a number of options regarding, for example, the size of the concordance or the maximum size of the files created (to split a large index into some smaller files that are better manageable).

The Greek samples on this page are displayed in the GraecaII font which is included in LaserGreek, which is available from Linguist's Software, Inc.,http://www.linguistsoftware.com.

For more information, our e-mail address is: alphamail@sns.it.
Click here to order a copy of SNS-Greek&Latin 6.0.