Entry preview should show gloss (or be configurable)

Hi! Thanks so much for making LanguageForge and the rest of your software available.

I am evaluating it for an upcoming collaborative bilingual dictionary effort, and it seems really great. One issue I’m having: in the entry preview section of the “new entry” page, the gloss for a given sense disappears as soon as a definition for the sense is added.

This seems quite problematic for a bilingual dictionary: I would expect the gloss (which is in the target language) to be a more important piece of information than the definition, which is in the source language. Or am I missing something?

Steps I followed:

  1. Create a new project with the source language set as your main language.
  2. Set it up such that senses have a gloss field in the target language, and a definition field in the source language.
  3. Start by inserting a sense with just a gloss in the target language, and observe how that’s displayed in the entry preview – as I would expect.
  4. Now add a definition for that same sense. Observe how the definition now replaces the gloss in the entry preview – which I would not expect.

Looking at the DOM, I can see that the content of the element that initially displays the gloss is simply replaced with the definition. This element is tagged with data-ng-bind-html="sense.meaning".

Is there any way to override this behaviour, and have both sense gloss and definition show up?

Many thanks!

Hi Baciccin,

Thanks for writing and your feedback. Language Forge is intended to work and sync with FLEx, so make sure that your project is setup to sync with FLEx (this process is somewhat tedious to setup initially, so please follow instructions here 5 Steps to Get Started with FLEx Send/Receive with Language Forge).

Language Forge shines by making it easy to add entries and discuss them with many other people online without the complexity and power of a desktop program. It is not intended to have the customizability of FLEx or be a way to publish your dictionary online (future feature). There is no way to customize what shows up in the entry preview, since that would be a dictionary publishing feature. FLEx allows you to customize exactly what fields are shown and formatted in the entry, and this is my recommendation for publishing in print or online via Webonary.

Thanks for the encouragement in developing Language Forge.

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