SEARCH TRANSLITERATIONS


Transliterations are currently valid only for 8-bit characters.
They are described by a .xlit text file with lines of the form:

     fromChar toChar

The chars can be specified by decimal (e.g., 334) or hex (0x12A) number, or
directly entered in quotes ('"', " ", "\\", etc.)



Additionally, you must include a line that says:

     NAME Name of transliteration



Optionally, you can include:

     OTHER otherChar

The otherChar is used for mapping any chars not specified, including
all chars outside the 1-255 range.  If unspecified, these chars are
not changed.



Finally, you can also include:

      SYMMETRIC n

where n is 0 (no) or 1 (yes).  By default transliterations are asymmetric, so
only the text to be searched is transliterated.  If the transliteration
is symmetric, then both the text to be searched and the input search
text are transliterated.  It is very strongly recommended that symmetric
transliterations be projective, i.e., that the result of applying a symmetric
transliteration twice be the same as that of applying it once.  Otherwise the
effect for users may be quite confusing.


Comments may start with # or //.


xlit2bin.pl is a perl script that converts a .xlit file into a binary
record which can then be placed in .pdb databases with creator ID Plkr and
type Xlit, e.g., by using toprc -d.  You can have arbitrarily many such records in
one of these databases, and as many such databases as you wish.
