Trilingual dictionary enhancement

Thanks for all the great tools over the years. Dictionary programs from early days have always been oriented to bilingual dictionaries (usually vernacular → English/national language, plus reversal), but have not catered so well for monolingual and trilingual formats, with various kinds of tweaking required. My current project in Vanuatu is a trilingual dictionary, being a monolingual dictionary of Bislama (national language; i.e. Bislama \lx with Bislama definitions etc.), with English and French glosses. Using LexiquePro I can get the desired output, but conversion to LIFT and then to DAB is not quite perfect. English and French tabs correctly link back to Bislama headwords, but in the Bislama index tab, where I was hoping for both English and French glosses to be displayed, only the English gloss is found after the bullet. You can click on the word to see the full entry, but there is a language politics dimension here: if the main Bislama screen only shows English glosses, and not French, it may be interpreted as unequal treatment of French!

For this project, it will be OK to have:
Bislama tab: → English gloss, French gloss
English tab: → Bislama headword
French tab: → Bislama headword.

However, it could be possible that the preferred structure would be:
Bislama tab: → English gloss, French gloss
English tab: —> Bislama headword, French gloss
French tab: → Bislama headword, English gloss.

So the enhancement required is: User selection of (i) gloss languages to be displayed in main source language tab and in other gloss language tabs, (ii) bullets or no bullets for each, (iii) color selection of each gloss language format, (iv) language name label if required.

I hope that this enhancement will be recognised as a valid core feature that should be included in DAB, and that it will be a relatively simple addition for you amazing programmers/developers!

Yes, I had this same issue. My un-elegant solution was to make multiple DAB apps for users who wanted the initial gloss language to be each language selection. However, I would really appreciate being able to have just one app to deal with. It would also be less confusing for users. Thanks to all who work on DAB!

I have written up an enhancement request for DAB for this issue.

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Great to hear of this Ian, will look forward to seeing this enhancement in due course!