Diogenes

Diogenes is a tool for searching, browsing and reading the databases of ancient texts, primarily in Latin and Greek, that are published by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Packard Humanities Institute.

The information here is only for people who want to delve into the technical details of Diogenes. If you just want to install and run it, ignore all this and go to the Diogenes webpage instead:

http://community.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/

Building

Diogenes can either be built and run as a HTTP server application, or as a standalone application that seamlessly combines both server and browser by using the Electron application framework (https://electronjs.org/).

Diogenes uses several dictionaries, as well as pre-computed morphology tables, which need to be built or downloaded before use. If you want to skip building these, execute this command, which will download the pre-computed data from Github:

make -f mk.prebuilt-data

If you would prefer to build the morphology data and dictionaries yourself, see the instructions below.

There are a few other files that need to be assembled before Diogenes can be run. To do that run this command:

make

Building Diogenes standalone

To build the standalone Diogenes application, with integrated server and browser, use one of these make commands according to the platform you're building for:

make linux64   # for linux (64 bit) build
make w32       # for windows build
make mac       # for mac osx build

Building the installers

To build an installer for your target platform, run one of the commands below. All installers can be built on either Linux or OS X. You will need to install a number of auxiliary programs, including librsvg, iconutils, wine and innoextract. All of these can easily be installed on Linux via your distribution and OS X using Homebrew. You will also need to install fpm via the Ruby package manager (see https://fpm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

make installer-w32        # Make a Windows installer
make installer-macpkg     # Make a Mac pkg installer
make installer-deb64      # Make a Debian package
make installer-rpm64      # Make an RPM Linux package
make installer-arch64     # Make a pacman package for Arch Linux

OS X note: If another version of Diogenes with the same version number is already installed, the Mac package installer will leave it untouched, will not install the new package, and will nonetheless report success.

Running the server

Instead of running the standalone, integrated app, you may prefer to run Diogenes as a server and to connect to it via an ordinary web browser. The server can be started using the script:

diogenes-browser/perl/diogenes-server.pl

For full usage details run it like this:

diogenes-browser/perl/diogenes-server.pl -?

Additional features

Diogenes has a number of other features which predate the development of the standalone app and which are no longer fully supported but which may still work. These include a command-line interface (dio), LaTeX output, and support for a wide variety of pre-Unicode encodings for Ancient Greek.

Building the morphology data & dictionaries

Instead of downloading the pre-built lexical data via make -f mk.prebuilt-data, you can build it from scratch. The following commands will download the lexica and the Morpheus parser, which have been provided by the Perseus project, and repackage them for Diogenes.

Step 1

The first step is to generate Greek and Latin wordlists. The default is to use wordlists derived from the TLG and from the PHI Latin database. Run this command, specifying the location of the databases on the command line:

make -f mk.tlg-phi-words PHIDIR=/path/to/phi TLGDIR=/path/to/tlg_e

If you prefer to generate the wordlists from the Perseus corpora (which have less extensive coverage but are freely available), run this command instead:

make -f mk.perseus-words

Step 2

The next step is to generate the morphological data by running Morpheus over the wordlists. This is the only part of the build process that probably requires running it on a Linux machine, as Morpheus does not compile on OS X. If you are on OS X and want to skip this step, you can just download and use the morphological data from version 3 of Diogenes, which still works fine with version 4. Run the following command and then go down to Step 3 below:

make -f mk.morpheus-v3

If you prefer to run Morpheus over the wordlists yourself, you have to choose between compiling an old version which works well and compiling the current version, which is broken.

To download, compile and run an older but known-good version of Morpheus, run this command:

make -f mk.morpheus-old

The current version of Morpheus from the Perseus project has some bugs in it that leads to incomplete and incorrect output, so it is recommended to use the older version. But if you want to try the current version, do this instead:

make -f mk.morpheus-broken

Step 3

The next step is to download the LSJ Greek lexicon and the L-S Latin lexica, which have been digitized by the Perseus project. To get the lexica from Perseus, run:

make -f mk.lexica-perseus

The Perseus version of the LSJ has had some errors corrected by the Logeion project, so to download that version instead (L-S will still come from Perseus), run:

make -f mk.lexica-logeion

Step 4

The final step is to download the lexica, integrate the morphological data with the lexica, and package all this in the form that Diogenes requires. To do this, run:

make -f mk.data

The intermediate files generated in the course of all of the steps above are put the build/ directory, and the final lexical data used by Diogenes is put in the dependencies/data directory, whence it is read by diogenes-server.pl.