Installing and Getting Started with the MultiLingual HyperText (MLHT) system

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Install mlht.el and other files on your local computer and get started editing and compiling some example source files from the FFII software patent documentation.

News & Chronology

• 2004-11-24 phm creates this page

Prerequisites

• Emacs V 21.3, probably any version starting from 20 is ok or nearly ok) with lisp packages
  • cl (Common Lisp emulation)
  • apel (path search utility)
  • UCS-Mule (unicode support)
  • Eric Marsden's Postgres Support package pg.el (currently supplied as part of mlht)
• To make the !LaTeX compilation run perfectly (not needed if you just want to edit files and make sure that they are correct):
  • !TeTeX
  • to support East-Asian languages
    • Cyberbit TTF font
  • in the future we may chose to work with ucs-latex
  • PostgreSQL on your own machine if you want to be able to work offline

Database Connection

To work with the mlht system, you need to have a connection to the FFII database or a similar database. Directly connecting to the live database on genba via an ssh tunnel is probably the best choice.

--> MlhtDbEn

The Files

On genba, you find the latest files at

• /usr/share/emacs/21.3/site-lisp/mlht/

or in the CVS direcory

• cvs.ffii.org:/var/cvs/mlht/

Pack this directory into a compressed archive, transfer it to your computer, unpack it in the site-lisp directory of your Emacs installation.

Make sure that all lisp files in that path can be invoked in your Emacs. This could be done by ensuring that

• /usr/share/emacs/21.3/site-lisp/subdirs.el

is there or by editing the emacs initialisation scripts.

You need in particular the following file

• mlht/sys/mlht.el

Aliases for deprecated definitions are foundin

• mlht/sys/mlht-deprek.el

The following is useful mainly in East-Asian contexts but may be required nevertheless:

• mlht/sys/hanzi.el mlht/sys/cjknum.el

The following may be used upon initialisation in order to byte-compile the lisp files.

• mlht/sys/make-mlht-elc.el

The following provide basic routines needed by mlht and by some other programs:

• mlht/bas/lisp-basis.el mlht/bas/daten-basis.el mlht/bas/string-basis.el

The following byte-compiles the above lisp files and may be invoked during initialisation:

• mlht/bas/make-basis-elc.el

In

• mlht/app/

you find source tests for FFII web pages. Among them, the following are particularly important:

• mlht/app/ffiidir.el mlht/app/swpatamendb.el mlht/app/swpatdir.el mlht/app/ffii/proj.el mlht/app/ffiirc.el

In some cases you may need the files

• mlht/app/nodes/*nodes

and link them into your local HTML tree in the following way:

• $ ln -s $PWD/mlht/app/nodes/swpatnodes $FFII/swpat/nodes.txt $ ln -s $PWD/mlht/app/nodes/paprinodes $FFII/swpat/papri/nodes.txt

etc. Currently the MLHT system is moving away from the use of such document (node) property definition files and instead defining all documents in the database. See below on how to insert new documents into the document tree.

Moreover the following may be needed:

• mlht/init/emacs-versions.el mlht/init/emacsrc.el mlht/init/make-basis-elc.el mlht/init/ffii-init.el

Just in case, install them all, and evaluate the following, possibly from your .emacs (initialisation) file:

• (defun find-eval (basename)
  • (let (file buf)
    • (and
      • (setq file (file-installed-p basename)) (setq buf (find-file-read-only file)) (eval-buffer buf) ) ) )
  (find-eval "ffii-init.el") (find-eval "mlht.el") (require 'mlht-deprek) (mlht-require 'ffii) (require 'swpatdir)

Basic Operations

Then open a sample file, such as e.g. mlht/app/ffii.el.

Select a document using

• M-x mlht-selekt

This command should be bound to the keys 'C-c C-m s'.

This command allows you to select

• language for evaluating (ML ...) expressions
• range of languages for compiling
• output format for evaluating ml expressions
• range of output formats for compiling

Perhaps you want to select only one language and HTML as the only output format.

After having selected the right document from your buffer, go on with

• M-x mlht-narrow-to-dokregion

This command should be bound to the keys 'C-c C-m n'.

After that you can

• evaluate multilinugal expressions (like all other lisp expressions, by pressing 'C-x C-e' one letter after the closing bracket).
• compile the document in question (by evaluating the buffer, i.e. by saying 'M-x eval-current-buffer', which should be bound to keys 'Esc [ [ F')

You can also create new ML expressions with random identifiers the following way:

• write something like: (ML 0 "..." (fr "..."))
• after a while, say 'M-x mlht-init-mlids' or 'C-c C-m i', and the zeroes will be replaced by unique identifiers.

You can read the latest translations from the database into your buffer by saying 'M-x mlht-insert-langtxts' or 'C-c C-m I'.

Normally the database is the source and you edit it only by submitting translations via knecht at ffii org into the database. But you can also make the ML expressions in your buffer the source by setting the variable 'mlht-ciska-mlexp-db-p' to 't' (true), using the 'M-x set-variable' command. Then you can directly write into the database by evaluating individual ML expressions. However when you evaluate the whole mlhtdoc buffer nothing will be written into the database and the database will still be the source.

Inserting new documents into the tree

MLHT documents do not have defined URLs but only properties from which their URLs are calculated.

Such properties are in particular stored in the 'dokprop' and 'traprop' tables of the mlht/ffii database.

One simple way to define these properties was the one used in the nodes.txt files, see above. This however is incompatible with the needs for distributed computing. We now have to use the database as the source and can use the nodes files only for illustrative purposes, as a means of bookkeeping.

Currently one way of continuing to use both methods is to write the document properties into the nodes.txt files according to the simple definitions and write the same informationdirectly into the database by evaluating a slightly less readable lisp statement:

• sub swpikmupli ep487110 ep803105 ep287578 ep797806 ep825525 # (apply 'mlht-ciska-doksub-db 'swpikmupli '(ep487110 ep803105 ep287578 ep797806 ep825525))

This means that the document group in the last subbracket (ep487110...) is subordinate to SwpikmupliEn, in the sense that each subdocument is in a subdirectory of the parent document.

• grp swpiktxtep98 swpiktxtep97 swpiktxtep96 swpiktxtep95 swpiktxtep94 swpiktxtep93 # (apply 'mlht-ciska-dokgrp-db 'swpiktxtep98 '(swpiktxtep97 swpiktxtep96 swpiktxtep95 swpiktxtep94 swpiktxtep93))

This means that the document group in the last subbracket is group member of the 'swpiktxtep98' group but yet lives in the same directory as the group's parent. The group concept is reflected only in how documents are arranged on navigation menus, not in the directory hierarchy.

There is a series of verbs of the form 'mlht-ciska-*-db' that set properties of documents in ways analogous to the nodes.txt files. We need to document this further.