MtScript is the winner of the 1996 CNRS/ANVIE prize for the scientific research industrial valorization

mtscriptchum

Abstract

This paper describes the multilingual text editor MtScript developed in the framework of the MULTEXT project. MtScript enables the use of many different writing systems in the same document (Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). Editing functions enable the insertion or deletion of text zones even if they have opposite writing directions. In addition, the languages in the text can be marked, customized keyboard input rules can be associated with each language and different character coding systems (one or two bytes) can be combined. MtScript is based on a portable environment (Tcl/Tk). MtScript.1.1 version has been developed under Unix/X-Windows (Solaris, Linux systems) and other versions are planned to be ported to the Windows and Macintosh environments. The current 1.1 version presents several limits that will be fixed in future versions, such as the justification of bi-directional texts, printing support, and text import/export support. Future versions will use SGML and TEI norms, which offer ways of encoding multilingual texts and are to a large extent meant for interchange.

Keywords

Multilingual text, document, character, keyboard input, coding standards, editing, textual data interchange.