Let’s take a look at the anatomy of Language Explorer in the context of editing the lexicon (the lexical database). In this screenshot, notice these four areas:

• In the lower left-hand corner, we have selected the “Lexicon” area.
• In the upper left-hand corner, we see all of the tools (or views) that are available in this area, and have selected “Lexicon Edit”.
• To the right of this is a “browse pane”, which has one row for each entry and one or more columns for the fields you want to see there.
• Finally, to the right of this is the “detail pane”, which gives you access to all of the fields of the selected lexical entry.

In the following screenshot, we have used the mouse to expand the width of the “browse pane”. You can see that we have three columns displaying now: Headword, Glosses in Portuguese, Glosses in English. As illustrated, we can customize which columns are displayed, and for fields that are available in multiple writing systems, we can choose which writing system to display. We can sort on any of these columns by clicking on the column label, and we can also choose to sort from the right side of the field. As we click a row in the browse pane, the corresponding record is displayed in the detail pane.

Also in the screenshot notice that next to the label “Sense 1″, there are a couple of hyperlinks labeled “Insert Example” and “Insert Sense”. These are shortcuts to frequently used commands. There is also a little blue icon with a triangle inside of a circle. Clicking on that brings up a menu of Actions you might want to perform on this sense. For example, we might want to move the sense up or down, or merge it with another sense. These sense controls are normally hidden so that the user interface is less cluttered; they appear only when the cursor is in the sense section.

Finally, notice that in this screenshot we have used the mouse to shrink the area given to field labels, so that now we see standard format-style abbreviations rather than the full labels shown in the previous screenshot.


In the next screenshot, we have collapsed the browse pane. Clicking on the sideways “Browse” button will pop it back to its previous size. In addition, by clicking on the “Show Hidden Fields” check box, we have told Language Explorer to display every possible field it knows about for the Lexeme. In Language Explorer, every field has a “visibility” property that we can control. For example, by default we don’t see the “Bibliography” field, unless it already has some data in it. By using the menu displayed in this screenshot, we can tell Language Explorer to always make that field visible or hidden, regardless of whether it is empty or not.

In this way, we can start using Language Explorer without being overwhelmed by all the options, and then just unveil more fields as we need them. If the field is not available, it can be added as a custom field.


In this final screenshot, we have expanded the browse pane to take up to full window.