I'm almost positive that my earlier fixes to the scripts for the other
languages was all that is needed and the reason they don't work is due
to the dictionary and the fact that in some languages it is hard if not
impossible to form perfect pangrams especially with the entire alphabet.
This appears to be the case with German. A point of interest that I put
in the German scripts is:
# Are the umlauts ä, ö, ü and Eszett (ß) letters in the German alphabet? There
# is more than one opinion on the subject but a lot of words do have an umlaut
# (or Umlaut in German). In some (probably all) systems this script outputs
# nothing probably because it's very hard to form a perfect pangram in German,
# if it's not impossible. Nevertheless, we do include the other characters
# whether or not they are in your view considered part of the alphabet for the
# reason that so many words have them.
I put it 'if it's not impossible' because this also depends on what
letters are provided. These scripts give the entry every letter,
however, including those with diacritics so in the case of German it's
not going to work. It is possible to make it work if you remove some
letters or you give a word that has all the letters (but that kind of
defeats the purpose). As for the other languages I don't know if it's
possible or not (and I'm not fluent in German either - I just know
some). A search suggested it's possible in some other languages but the
author noted it's not in Spanish at least according to their estimates.
Nevertheless I believe that the fixes I made are all that's needed so
this entry now has INABIAF in the bugs.md file.
Fixed the Makefile so the alt version would actually build. Added
scripts to use the alt version instead.
Format/typo check README.md file.
Added try.sh and try.alt.sh.
Downloaded and converted the PS file linked to by the author to PDF and
added to repo.
Fixed scripts to use LC_ALL=C. This was necessary especially for de.sh
as the tr invocation had invalid bytes. Similar requirement was in
getwords.sh. But since I changed the one I decided to change the others
too.
I note that both before and after the fix the alternative languages do
not work under macOS or fedora linux. I don't know if this is the wrong
locale (the author does suggest UTF-8) or the dictionary or something
else but I noted it anyway.
I added this latter problem to bugs.md. Whilst at it I added some notes
and fixes to bugs.md.
The 2020 winners are hinted it, but the source code is not there,
nor are the hints. Someone could look into the HTML and
see what was commented out, but that is not a problem because
WHO won is known and the name of their AWARD is known already.
Moreover a number of the winners have talked about what their
entirs do, so the commented out spoiler text is not a bit problem.
One will find HTML commented out with:
<!-- XXX remove when 2020 is ready
2020 links here
XXX remove when 2020 is ready -->
The "XXX remove when 2020 is ready" string is found at the
start and end comment blocks. Again, soneone could read
what was commented out, but that is OK since most of that
information is known or can be known. The following files
have such HTML comment blocks in them.
./winners.html
./years-spoiler.html
./years.html
In addition, ./all/summary.txt was modified to not
include the 2020 entries for the momemt.
The 2020 winner code AND write-ups are NOT part of this set.
p.s. The all/all.tar.bz2 does not contain the 2020 source code (yet?).
Cody Boone Ferguson