TkBiblook, v1.4.3, May 11th, 1996 ftp://ftp.inslab.uky.edu/pub/tcl/tkbiblook/tkbiblook.tar.gz Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky Joel Abbott Jerzy W. Jaromczyk This app was developed by Joel Abbott as a project in an independent study course with Dr. Jaromczyk , Department of Computer Sciences, University of Kentucky. There are many methods for doing Computational Geometry Database lookups. The tried-and-true method of doing lookups via the command-line biblook program is very popular. Some people feel more comfortable with a display-type interface. This is where TkBiblook or a web-browser lookup show promise. TkBiblook can be especially useful on standalone computers, in instances where an internet connection's costs can be significant, or in any situation in general where making lookups on the web is not practical. An upcoming feature will have the option of saving mouse-clicked selections in the result window instead of the entire results (sometimes not everything is wanted). Just as with biblook, this program is in the public domain. You may use it or modify it at your own risk. To run thus application, get the biblook package if you don't already have it. TkBiblook, biblook, and bibindex all come with the bundled Computational Geometry Database package - if you obtained TkBiblook with the geometry database then you are OK. These can all be found at the main archive site: ftp://ftp.cs.usask.ca/pub/geometry/ Compile biblook and bibindex, or you can let TkBiblook try to compile them for you (not guaranteed). bibindex sets up the database so that biblook can do the database lookups. TkBiblook is just a front-end to the biblook program. If TkBiblook has problems compiling biblook and bibindex, see the README documentation that comes with biblook and bibindex for instructions on getting them compiled. Next you will need to unarchive the TkBiblook package. If you obtained TkBiblook with the geometry database, you an skip this paragraph. "tkbiblook.tcl" depends on a directory called "tkbiblook" that comes with the package. This directory contains the help file and some images for the tcl script. As it stands, the "tkbiblook" directory must be in the same directory as the tkbiblook.tcl script. If you wish to move the "tkbiblook" directory, then change the location of the variable "libdir" in the tcl script. An installation process is planned for a future release of TkBiblook so that these details are not a problem. After biblook is compiled, you may install it if you wish, however, the directory containing the biblook binary must be in your PATH environment variable. Also, the directory containing the geometry database must be in either the BIBLOOKPATH environment variable or the BIBINPUTS environment variable, or the location of the database must be specified on the command line. See biblook's manual page for more information on using the environment variables. An example of using the command line to specify the location of the database would be: tkbiblook.tcl /usr/local/lib/geom.bib TkBiblook will then need the Tcl/Tk package installed if this hasn't already been done. I developed TkBiblook with Tcl7.4 and Tk4.0. I haven't tested later versions yet, but they should work. Earlier versions of Tcl/Tk (pre-Tcl7.4 and pre-Tk4.0) will not work. I have attempted to at least give an error message if I can detect that an earlier version of Tk is being used, but this may not always work. The Tcl/Tk packages are available via ftp://ftp.smli.com/pub/tcl/ The default location for wish is usually /usr/local/bin/wish. If it has been installed somewhere else, change the first line of tkbiblook.tcl to the locally installed location. This app wont't work fully with any other port of Tcl/Tk except a unix port due to a couple things that are unix-specific. Also, as TkBiblook is just a front end to biblook and uses bibindex, these two programs will have to work on a non-unix system as well. The docs and code suggest that they should work with windows/dos, but I haven't verified this. I will be working on making TkBiblook work under Windows and on MacOS as starting with Tcl7.5 and Tk4.1, support for these systems is integrated. Any comments and/or suggestions? Please mail to Joel Abbott -and- Jerzy W. Jaromczyk Bugs: -- 2/2/96, abbott@inslab.uky.edu Since TkBiblook is just a front-end to the ascii/command-line version of biblook, the "regular expressions" used for lookups in TkBiblook are of the same implementation. There is a known problem with the way TkBiblook interfaces with biblook in that if one enters a regular expression that biblook cannot understand (for example when one enters an unknown key word for searching), one will get unexpected results. For example, the regular expression: title diagram and badkey graph will result in unexpected behavior because "badkey" is not a valid search key. The most likely result will be that TkBiblook will give you the entire database, something which is not usually desired. A fix is known and is in the "todo" list.