Lynkeus

Lynkeus is a tool to find parallel passages in Classical Greek and Roman Literature. In the future it should be usable with any of the more important corpora available; at the moment, it supports only querying the legacy database published by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae via the included versions of Peter Heslins Diogenes Perl modules[^1] (support for the PHI Latin corpus should be coming soon).

[^1] See the Github repository.

Requirements

This is an early alpha version of Lynkeus, so installing and running Lynkeus has to be done by hand. Things should get better as soon as multiple system configurations have been tested successfully and a proper build system has been implemented.

It is planned to port Lynkeus to MacOS and Windows in the near future.

The requirements are, in theory, only a few:

• Tcl and Tk
• Perl with the Tcl and Tkx modules (to install these, you need make and a C compiler)
• Groff (full installation) for export to PDF

The intended version of Perl is 5.14+, but due to some bug in the modified Diogenes libraries, Perl 5.36+ is required (variable length lookbehind support). I will tackle this problem shortly. Lynkeus has been developed on Arch Linux (x86_64) and Termux on Android, where it runs fine. It also works as intended on Ubuntu 23.10 (Perl 5.36), but it does not so on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or Linux Mint, probably due to Perl 5.34.

Installing

For Arch Linux, the commands are the following:

pacman -S base-devel
pacman -S tk
pacman -S perl # should be already present
cpan Tcl Tkx

For Ubuntu, do the following:

sudo apt install build-essential # for make and gcc
sudo apt install perl            # should be already present
sudo cpan Tcl Tkx

Then clone the git repository. Lynkeus ships with the GentiumPlus font, which can be found in the fonts directory. Install the TTS fonts somewhere your system can find them.

Because of the 100MB limit of GitHub, the essential analyses files needed for the lemma search mode have been compressed and must be uncompressed. The archive is /data/greek-analyses.tar.gz, both files must go into the /data folder. You can use the shell script included in /build

/PATH/TO/Lynkeus/build/extract-data.sh

For the pdf export to work, your groff distribution must have the gropdf output device, the mom macro package and the GentiumPlus fonts installed. On Arch, there should be a full groff distribution preinstalled; Debian based Linux distributions include only a minimal groff environment by default, so the full groff package has to be installed manually:

sudo apt install groff

To install the fonts, run the install.pl script in the /fonts/groff directory.

cd /PATH/TO/Lynkeus
sudo perl fonts/groff/install.pl

The main executable, lynkeus.pl, resides in /bin. You can execute it with

cd /PATH/TO/Lynkeus
bin/lynkeus.pl      # or perl bin/lynkeus.pl

For your convenience, you can rite a simple wrapper script, make it executable and move it somewhere in your $PATH:

echo '#! /bin/sh
exec perl /PATH/TO/Lynkeus/bin/lynkeus.pl "$@"' > lynkeus
chmod 755 lynkeus
mv lynkeus /SOMEWHERE/IN/YOUR/PATH

Note on save files

One valid lynkeus save file (*.lyn) can be given as an argument; Lynkeus will load it automatically. But beware: these save files are architecture specific and cannot be ported from one architecture to another. What is more, future changes in Lynkeus can easily affect the load behaviour. Using old save files on newer versions can lead to a segmentation fault.