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LkbMacintosh
Currently (August 2017) there is an experimental version of the LKB for macOS, which looks and behaves similarly to the long-established version built in Allegro CL. At present, the code is very fluid so the changes to the LKB source code required for this version have not yet been committed to the central code repository. Until that happens, you can download a binary archive for macOS, lkb_macos.tgz. See the following sections for installation and usage instructions.
An alternative approach is to run a Linux or Windows version of the LKB in a virtual machine. You can install Windows on the Mac using Parallels Desktop. This will let you run a virtual Windows machine in a window on your running macOS system. Then you can install the Windows binary of LKB into Parallels. This seems to work well. One caveat is that the virtual Windows machine will want to allocate its own chunk of memory when it is started, in order to emulate physical memory for Windows. You can control how much memory you want it to take; note that you will need substantially more physical memory than you allocate to the virtual machine.
The macOS version of the LKB uses X Windows graphics, so first install !XQuartz from https://www.xquartz.org if you don't already have it. Then follow the 'Manual Installation' instructions on the LkbInstallation page. The archive contains an LKB precompiled binary, lkb.command. You can run it by typing its name in the Terminal application or in an xterm hosted by XQuartz. Alternatively, you can just double-click the file.
There is built-in support for the Linguistic User Interface (LUI): see the LkbLui pages for information on installing and using the LUI. Type (lui-initialize) and (lui-shutdown) to enable and disable it, respectively. Unfortunately the current macOS version of the LUI has usability problems; to mitigate some of these, the LKB overrides the LUI's phrase structure tree display facilities.
Porting the LKB to macOS has provided an opportunity to make some improvements to the LKB code base. In addition, the use of a different underlying Lisp system (SBCL with McCLIM rather than Allegro CL and its native CLIM implementation) gives advantages in the areas of efficiency, multilingual support, and visual appearance. Moreover, SBCL and McCLIM are open source, which means that this version of the LKB will be completely open source when it is fully released. Improved features include:
- Dialogs: these have been reimplemented to improve their appearance, and a user-friendly file selector dialog has been added.
- Parser local ambiguity packing: this was previously turned off by default, resulting in even moderately long or ambiguous sentences over-running the chart edge limit. A couple of minor packing/unpacking issues have been resolved and packing is now turned on by default.
- Multilingual support: SBCL has excellent support for Unicode and McCLIM works well for Unicode output, so the LKB can work with grammars using any language script.
Experienced LKB users might notice further refinements:
- Aesthetic window placement, using intelligent cascading.
- Responsive window resizing (file selector dialogs and parse tree windows reformat their contents when they are resized).
- More informative window titles.
- Info line in tree windows, showing details of the currently selected tree or tree node.
- More intelligent defaults for view commands.
- Much faster type hierarchy and chart window display.
Text fields in dialogs do not respond to mouse or trackpad gestures (clicking / dragging), but expect keyboard commands using the arrow keys, backspace key and standard Emacs key bindings. Useful commands in this context are:
Ctrl-space: set mark
Alt-B / Alt-F: go backwards / forwards one word
Alt-Backspace / Alt-D: delete previous / next word
In addition, the following commands access the macOS clipboard:
Ctrl-C: copy to clipboard the text between cursor and mark
Ctrl-X: cut to clipboard the text between cursor and mark
Ctrl-V: paste from clipboard at cursor
Ctrl-Z: undo the last change
The LKB can output characters in any Unicode font. However, there is no font substitution: all characters to be displayed have to be in the (single) selected font. For input, at present there is no way to switch keyboard layouts or select input methods. A workaround is to copy the text to the clipboard and then paste it into the parse dialog. See the GeFaqUnicodeInput page for further suggestions.
Suitable Unicode fonts for output are DejaVu Sans (attractive, with reasonable coverage of many scripts), Code2000 (less attractive, but excellent coverage), or WenQuanYi Zen Hei (reasonably attractive, with good coverage of CJK scripts). These are not standard macOS fonts, so you will have to download them yourself and install them - a suitable location on your machine is /opt/X11/share/fonts/TTF/. You can use the following Unix command to select DejaVu Sans:
cat > ~/.fonts.conf <<!
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<fontconfig>
<dir>/opt/X11/share/fonts/TTF</dir>
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>DejaVu Sans</family>
<family>Code2000</family>
<family>WenQuanYi Zen Hei</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
</fontconfig>
!
You can check that DejaVu Sans is selected by running the Unix command
fc-match Sans:
The output of this command should be
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
You can then start up the LKB and it will use this font.
Unanticipated errors may cause the LKB graphical interface to become unresponsive. This is because the underlying Lisp system is expecting the user to enter the debugger for that thread. To enter the debugger, execute (sb-thread::release-foreground) at the Lisp prompt. You can then type backtrace to inspect the context of the error, and Ctrl-D to kill the thread. The interface should then start responding again.
If you encounter problems using the macOS LKB, please email the support address for the LKB (and other LinGO resources): [email protected].
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