Welcome

This is a small package of software to enable you to create a hypertext version of the Project Gutenberg release of Roget's Thesaurus. It was written by Nathan Torkington, working for the Computer Services Centre of the Victoria University of Wellington.

Distribution

You should have received in this distribution:
README
This file.
README.html
This file, but in HTML format.
copyright.html
The copyright and disclaimer on this thesaurus, in HTML format.
description.html
A description of the thesaurus, in HTML format.
home.html
The home page for the thesaurus, in HTML format.
make-index
A perl script to build an index page (in HTML) for the thesaurus.
make-roget
A shell script to call the other scripts.
split-items
A perl script to split the thesaurus into many files.
strip-comments
A perl script to strip the comments from the raw thesaurus file, and mark it up with HTML.

What you will need

A Unix compatible (POSIX might possibly do) machine that has Larry Wall's Perl interpreter (available for FTP from many sites -- check archie for more information) and approximately 4Mb of free disk space (2Mb are needed for the final version, but splitting the entries into separate files temporarily requires more).

You will also need a copy of the copy of the etext in its original plain ASCII form. It is available via anonymous FTP from mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub/etext/etext91 as roget13a.txt.

Important!

READ THE copyright.html AND description.html FILES -- there are restrictions and disclaimers that must be read before using or reading this work.

What to do

  1. Extract the distribution into a directory with the ASCII thesaurus file.
  2. Edit the file make-roget and set the variables ENTRYDIR, SOURCEFILE, PGHOME and INDEXFILE to reflect how you want it set up. It is set up to work with the roget13a version of the thesaurus -- if you are using an earlier version, you must change the SOURCEFILE variable.

  3. Ensure the files make-roget, make-index, strip-comments , and split-items are all executable by yourself.
  4. Change directory to the directory with the distribution and run the command ./make-roget to split the thesaurus and make the index.
  5. If all went well, you can now remove the plain-text thesaurus -- the WWW version does not need it.