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SILConverters 2.6 (and 2.6.1)

Microsoft Word/COM support for TECkit, CC, and ICU

Bob Eaton, Mark Penny, 2008-01-08

Overview

This package provides tools through which you can change the encoding, font, and/or script of text in Microsoft Word and other Office documents, XML documents, and SFM text and lexicon documents. It also installs a system-wide repository to manage your encoding converters and transliterators (TECkit,  CC,  ICU, Perl, or Python based, as well as support for adding custom transduction engines). For developers, it provides a simple COM interface to select and use a converter from the repository. It is easy to use from VBA, C++, C#, Perl, Python or any .NET/COM enabled language. This package is fully integrated with SIL FieldWorks, AdaptIt, and the forthcoming Speech Analyzer 3.0 and Phonology Assistant 3.0 software, providing the same system-wide registry of installed and available encoding converters for all of these user programs. Additionally the package includes some extra utilities such as a clipboard converter for manipulating text between cut and paste operations.

The following picture illustrates the suite of tools, utilities, and applications that are available and how they interact:

Figure 1 shows the three distinct layers to SIL Converters.

• At the top are various client applications. These user-oriented programs use the EncConverters core assembly to provide encoding conversion and other transduction facilities to their users.
• The EncConverters core provides an abstraction layer so the client applications can access the various transduction engines without having to implement the interface to each one separately.
• The transduction engines are the server applications that provide the actual conversion/text processing capability.

If you are an end user, you are probably most interested in how to use EncConverters with client applications—for example:

• Using the Data Conversion Macro in Microsoft Word to convert the encoding of a document to Unicode, or
• Using Bulk SFM Converter to convert SFM documents into Unicode (typically texts and lexicons from Shoebox to Toolbox)

If you are a developer, you may be interested in

• Using EncConverters to gain access to the different transduction resources available by writing to the single EncConverters’ interface. See this webpage for details and code snippets.

Upgrade! New Features

SILConverters 2.6 corresponds to the same version of the core EncConverters assembly as Fieldworks 4.2 and Speech Analyzer 3.0 and Phonology Assistant 3.0.

The new 2.6.1 version of SILConverters corresponds to the same version of the core EncConverters assembly as Fieldworks 4.9 and 5.0, Speech Analyzer 3.0.1 and early test versions of Phonology Assistant 3.0.

Both versions include the following upgrades to the SILConverters suite (see the SIL Converters 2.6 documentation file for more information):

• New Client Applications
  • Bulk Word document converter — Use this application to convert one or more Word documents using converters from the system repository. Though it has similar functionality to the Data Conversion Macro, this tool is used outside of the Microsoft Word environment and can be used on multiple documents at the same time. It is also recommended for documents that have very complex formatting, which the Data Conversion Macro occasionally has difficulty converting correctly.
  • SILConverters for Office — This Office add-in gives EncConverters support in Microsoft Publisher, Excel, and Access.

  • Note

    This application requires the Microsoft Word Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) to be installed. These can only be installed either from your Microsoft Office/Word 2003/2007 CD/DVD or from a 4MB download available from the Microsoft website and only if you have Microsoft Word 2003/2007 installed on your machine.

    On some machines, these assemblies will automatically be installed the first time they are requested, so you can try the program first to see if this is the case for your computer. However, if the program crashes, see the FAQ page  here, for details on installing the Office Primary Interop Assemblies via one of the other two methods.

• Discourse Chart Builder — This application helps you prepare discourse analysis charts to study discourse features of a vernacular language text. It uses Adapt It for glossing.
• New Transducers
  • AdaptIt Target Word Guesser — This transducer can be used in an Adapt It adaptation project to guess target words based on the Source/Target word pairs in the Adapt It Knowledge Base.
• New Maps & Tables packages containing converters for:
  • Cameroon
  • Central Africa
  • East Africa
  • Eastern Congo Group
  • West Africa
  • Hebrew
  • Papua New Guinea

Quick Installation Overview

The Master Setup program runs a series of installers:

1. Software prerequisites—Necessary system updates and add-ons are installed on your computer.
2. SIL Encoding Converters 2.6 Setup—Conversion applications are installed and conversion Maps and Tables are copied to your hard drive.
3. SIL Converters for Office 2003—Currently this installer only installs an additional operating system update.
4. Converter Installer—A utility that allows you to activate the conversion Maps and Tables you want to use.

Full installation instructions can be found here: SIL Converters 2.6 (and 2.6.1) Installation. This document is intended to guide you through the Master Installer installation screens and initial SIL Converters2.6 Setup. This guide may be sufficient for many users. However, to make full use of SIL Converters 2.6, you should download and refer to the SIL Converters 2.6 Documentation Help (download below).

Downloads

SIL Converters 2.6.1

Use these installers unless you have FieldWorks 4.2, Speech Analyzer 3.0 or early test versions of Phonology Assistant 3.0. If you have any of these application versions, use the SIL Converteres 2.6 installers, below.

SIL Converters 2.6

Use this version only if you have FieldWorks 4.2, Speech Analyzer 3.0 or early versions of Phonology Assistant 3.0. Otherwise use 2.6.1, above

Previous versions

The older products are still available for those who require it:

• SILConverters 2.5
  • SIL Converters 2.5 Installation
  • SIL Converters 2.5 documentation
• SILConverters 2.2
• SILConverters 2.1 and the older
• Encoding Converters

Please note, however, that we strongly recommend using the newer version from this page.

SIL Converters Maps and Tables

This section describes the encodings, font names, and converters contained in the different Maps and Tables packages available in the SILConverters 2.6 installer. You can check below for the fonts/encodings that you are interested in to see which Maps and Tables package to install.

Most end-users are interested only in a small number of encodings. Typically, computer support people have created TECkit maps and/or CC tables for the various encodings used in each entity, alleviating most end-users from having to create their own maps and tables.

Because there are hundreds of possible encoding converters and transliterators that different end-users may be interested in, they are packaged into logically-related groups of converters and are available via a two-step process.

Steps

1. Use the SILConverters installer to install the package(s) of converter likely to be useful to you (e.g. based on your entity).
   1. During installation, all the converter maps/tables in the selected package(s) will be installed into a fixed location on your computer (i.e. C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication ataSILSILConverters22MapsTables).
2. Use the Converter Installer application to install the few applications you want into the EncConverters’ repository.
   1. They become available to SILConverters client applications.

The following sections give the details about fonts and encodings for different Maps and Tablespackages:

Basic Converters

Converters and Transliterators common to all SIL. This includes the following:

ICU Transliterators

Configuration information for the following ICU transliterators are for Unicode-encodings only.

These are not the only transliterators available via the ICU Transliterator transduction engine, but are only a few of the pre-defined latinizing (or romanizing) transliterators that can be useful in different client applications for different ranges of Unicode.

• Devanagari to Latin (aka. Devanagari-Latin)
• Bengali to Latin (aka. Bengali-Latin)
• Gujarati to Latin (aka. Gujarati-Latin)
• Gurmukhi to Latin (aka. Gurmukhi-Latin)
• Kannada to Latin (aka. Kannada-Latin)
• Malayalam to Latin (aka. Malayalam-Latin)
• Oriya to Latin (aka. Oriya-Latin)
• Tamil to Latin (aka. Tamil-Latin)
• Telugu to Latin (aka. Telugu-Latin)
• Arabic to Latin (aka. Arabic-Latin)
• Cyrillic to Latin (aka. Cyrillic-Latin)
• Greek to Latin (aka. Greek-Latin)
• Han to Latin (aka. Han-Latin)
• Hangul to Latin (aka. Hangul-Latin)
• Hebrew to Latin (aka. Hebrew-Latin)
• Hiragana to Latin (aka. Hiragana-Latin)
• Katakana to Latin (aka. Katakana-Latin)
• Jamo to Latin (aka. Jamo-Latin)
• NumericPinyin to Latin (aka. NumericPinyin-Latin)
• Any to Latin (aka. Any-Latin)

FindPhone to IPA converters

Adds the following converters for dealing with FindPhone encoded data:

• FindPhone>SIL IPA93
• FindPhone>UNICODE

SAG Indic

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/font:

Cameroon

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Central Africa

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding:

East Africa

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Eastern Congo Group

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

West Africa

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Hebrew

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

Indic Converters

• Font2Iscii

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following fonts:

• ITrans

Also available in this package are the  ITrans to Unicode converters for the following languages:

• UTrans

Also available in this package are the  UTrans converters for Unicode presentation form of Urdu (Arabic)

• Himalli

Also available in this package are several converters for these different Himalli encodings:

• Miscellaneous TECkit Converters

Also available in this package are TECkit converters for miscellaneous Indic encodings:

Papua New Guinea

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/fonts:

NLCI (India)

Contains encoding converter map(s) for the following encoding/font:

Related resources

Encoding Conversion Frequently Asked Questions and Known Issues Lorna A. Priest, 2009-05-15
Frequently Asked Questions and Known Issues concerning conversion of legacy data to Unicode.

SIL IPA93 Data Conversion Lorna A. Priest, 2009-02-16
Step-by-step instructions on how to convert Microsoft Word, text or Standard Format (sfm) documents that use SIL IPA93 fonts in order to use Unicode fonts.

To compose or decompose, that is the question Bob Hallissy, 2005-02-15
In our workflow, should we standardize on composed (e.g., NFC) or decomposed (e.g., NFD) character encoding for our Unicode data?

Contact information

Contact for limited support.

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