QL-RHYMES 

BASIC INFORMATION

QL-RHYMES is a rhyming dictionary for QDOS/SMSQ(-E) compatible computers.


SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

A QL or QDOS compatible computer with disk drives and at least 768K memory (Trump Card or better). QL-RHYMES requires about 51K and its data-base about 655K. A fast processor, minimum Gold Card, is advisable.

QL-RHYMES requires Toolkit 2 to be active and the pointer environment files or SMSQ(-E) to be installed.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

QL-RHYMES is a QLIBERATOR compiled program. The data base was written on the Perfection word processor. Two routines from the DIY Toolkit by Simon N Goodwin are built into the program, and it was written using Albin Hessler's EASYPTR suite.

A special word of thanks must go to John Terry, who inspired and beta tested the program. He has a technical knowledge of rhymes far superior to mine, and suggested several improvements. Any shortcomings, however, remain my own work.


FIRST ESSENTIALS

Please check the supplied media to see if there is a file called UPDATES_DOC. If present, this will contain details of last minute changes to the program and you should read it before you start to use the program. It can be read and printed using the Quill word processor. You should also make a copy of the master disk before proceeding further.


ON THE DISK

The following files are on the QL-RHYMES disk:

Boot: load and runs QL-RHYMES
QLRhymes_obj: Program
QLRhymes_def: Definition file
Rhymes_eng: Data base
Updates_doc: Updates file if available


BOOTING UP

QL-RHYMES can be booted from the disk.

It can also be run via the direct command:

EX flp1_QLrhymes_obj

QLRhymes loads two supplementary files, QLRhymes_def and Rhymes_eng, the data base.


HARD DISK INSTALLATION

QL-RHYMES can be installed on any medium. However you will need to tell the program where to find the supplementary files. To install QL-RHYMES onto a hard disk please follow the following procedure:

1: Copy the files from flp1_ to the required drive and directory.

E.g. WCOPY flp1_ to win1_rhymes_

2: Now load the program from the master disk in flp1_.

3: Press "L" or click on WORD LIST. Change flp1_ to the name of your drive and directory and reload the dictionary from your chosen medium.

4: Now press "C" or click on CONFIGURE. A new menu appears.

5: Press "D" or click on DEVICE. Amend this to your chosen drive and directory.

6: Press "F" or click on FINISHED to save the new defaults.

7: Use the QJUMP configuration program or MENU CONFIG to alter the drive and directory.

8: Instead of step 7 you could start the program via a parameter passed in an EX command:

EX win1_rhymes_qlrhymes_obj;"win1_rhymes_"


If you do not want to read this manual, you should read and follow this section. It will teach you how to use QL-RHYMES. 

1: Put the QL-RHYMES disk in flp1_  and enter "lrun flp1_boot". As the program has a large data base, it may take some time to load. 

2: You will see two sets of commands. One set on the left hand side of the screen are the main menu commands. The other set, at the bottom of the screen, are the search commands. Some of these are illegible as we have not yet started a search.

3: Two of the main menu commands, PHONETIC and END LETTERS, are in a red box. These are the commands we use to start a search.

4: Press "P" or click on "PHONETIC". You will see a window open that invites you to enter a word. Now type in the word "Rhymes", and press ENTER. Twenty rhymes appear on the screen. These include times, climbs, enzymes and paradigms. A phonetic search looks at the sound of a word to find rhymes.

5: If you look at the bottom of the screen, you will see two commands have become legible. Press M or click on "MAIN MENU" to return to the main screen.

6: Now press E or click on END LETTERS. This time you are asked to enter end letters. Enter "ymes" the last four letters of rhymes. This time only two words are found.

7: Press N or click on NEW SEARCH. Now enter "imes". This time only words ending in "imes" are found. One word "regimes" does not even rhyme with the other words.

8: Usually you will only need to search under PHONETICS, but occasionally end letters can prove helpful in getting you started. Press M or click on MAIN MENU and then press P or click on PHONETICS. Now enter the name "Giles".

9: Oh dear, we now have a message that "Giles" is not in the data base, but there is a little bit of advice on the screen. If we follow this advice and press enter, QL-RHYMES automatically switches into END LETTER mode. Now type in "iles", the last letters of Giles.

10: This is a slight diversion from finding a rhyme for "Giles", but you will see there is a new command "Page DOWN". Click on this command or press D. A new screen of words appears. Click on "Page UP" or press U to return to the original list.

11: Most of the words in this list would rhyme with "Giles", but let us choose the first one, "Files". Press M or click MAIN MENU. Press P or click PHONETIC. Enter "files" as the search word. We now have a list of phonetic rhymes for Giles.

12: Not all commands have been covered in this quick start section. If you want to know how to use these commands, you can find the information in the MAIN MENU and SEARCH MENU sections of this manual. 

13: Now try a few of your own rhymes. Have fun! If you do not want to read this manual in full, you may find it helpful to read the section, "The Hate Problem".


QL-RHYMES has three groups of menu commands, the MAIN MENU, the SEARCH MENU and the CONFIGURATION MENU.


MAIN MENU

The main menu commands are on the left hand side of the opening screen. 

Immediately under the Just Words! logo and name are two standard pointer environment icons.

MOVE allows you to reposition the program on the screen.

SLEEP allows you to put the program to sleep on a button.

ESC = QUIT allows you to leave the program. You can either press the ESCape key or click on the command.

Beneath this, in a red box, are the two commands to start a search.

PHONETICS looks for rhymes, as you would expect, phonetically.

END LETTERS looks for rhymes using the end letters of the search word.

Details of how to use these commands are given in the next section "Searching the Data Base".

At the bottom of the screen are two further commands:

HELP accesses a series of help screens to jog your memory about the use of the program.

CONFIGURE accesses the configuration screen, which allows you to customise the program to your preferences. Details of the Configuration Menu are given below.


SEARCH MENU

The SEARCH MENU commands are at the bottom of the screen. The commands are only legible when they are available.

MAIN MENU ends the current search and returns you to the main menu.
NEW SEARCH ends the present search and allows you search for a new word.

Page DOWN and Page UP allow you to move to the following or preceding page respectively.

WORD LIST is strictly speaking not a search command. It allows you to load a new data base. You are unlikely to need this command unless you want to write your own data base or a new data base becomes available.


CONFIGURATION MENU

The CONFIGURATION MENU is accessed by the CONFIGURE command on the MAIN MENU. It allows you to alter the program's parameters. This can be either temporarily at run time or permanently to give new defaults.

SOUND switches the BEEP on and off.

BACKGROUND and INK set the background and ink colours for the results window. You can observe the effect of any changes in the small window on the Configuration Screen.

Output from QL-RHYMES can be sent to a printer or file. The next few commands concern this:

PRINTER switches the printer on and off.

OUTPUT sets the printer device. This will normally be par of ser1 for a printer, and a drive and name for a file.

COLUMN toggles between a 1 and 3 column print out.

Baud RATE sets the baud rate.

When you have finished making your changes, you can either return to the main menu or save your changes to disk.

FINISH returns you to the main menu without saving the changes.

DEVICE allows you to specify the drive where you want to save the configuration file, qlrhymes_def. This file tells QL-RHYMES the name and place of the data base, the screen colours, the sound and printer information. 


There are two methods of searching the data base for rhymes.

PHONETIC is the primary search mode as it looks for words ending in the same sound as the search word. Thus "rhymes" rhymes with both time and thyme, and also paradigm. When you click on PHONETIC or press 'P', a small window opens asking you to enter the search word. On pressing ENTER the results of the search are displayed.

There are some restrictions on phonetic searching. For example, your search word may not be in the data base, or QL-RHYMES produces only a few results. This is more fully described in the section below headed "The hate problem".

If your search word is not included in the data base, QL-RHYMES will inform you of this, and then automatically switch into END LETTER mode so you can continue searching. If you do not want to do an END LETTER search just press enter to take you back to the main menu.

END LETTER searches will normally be used when a phonetic search has failed, because either the search word is not in the data base or too few rhymes have been found. When you click on END LETTER or press "E", a small window opens inviting you to enter the end letters of the search word. QL-RHYMES will find all words in its data base ending in these letters.

An END LETTER search will usually produce more rhymes than a PHONETIC search, but will also give many errors. If you typed in "ough", you would get "bough", "cough", "dough", and "rough". You can choose the nearest rhyme from this list, and then try a PHONETIC search using that word.

In both PHONETIC and END LETTER searches the results are displayed partly by word length and partly alphabetically. This is because the shorter words often give the easiest rhymes. It also makes it easier to find polysyllablic rhymes such as "mendacious", "pugnacious" and "ungracious". 


THE HATE PROBLEM

If you type the word "hate" into QL-RHYMES, you will get only three words displayed, "ate", "hate" and "eight", although there are numerous rhymes of "hate". 
Hate illustrates one of the difficulties of a software rhyming dictionary. To make a dictionary that is quick, easy and fun to use, you have to make compromises and this leads to shortcomings. 

In theory QL-RHYMES can have a data base that is limited only by the size of your computer's memory. In practice, the size of the data base supplied with QL-RHYMES was determined by the limitations of a DD disk. In the data base there are no words longer than 11 letters and very few personal and place names. It is partially because of these restrictions that there are two methods of searching the data base.
A second area of compromise is the number of displayed results. There has to be a balance between sufficient results to make a search worthwhile, but not so many that they would swamp the user. The word "hate" illustrates this point perfectly.

To find all words rhyming with "hate", you would have to look for words ending in "ate", "eight", "aight", "ait" and "eat". There are over 600 possible rhymes in the dictionary, and if all were displayed you would have to scroll through 25 screens. That is hardly user friendly. Just think of the problem of looking for words ending in "ing". There are 960 of them.

As a compromise the phonetic groupings of words ending in "ate" go a step deeper than the simple "ate" sound. Thus they are grouped phonetically as "date", "rate", "tate" etc. Unfortunately in this type of grouping there are some stragglers that do not fit into the large groups and "hate" was one of these.

A third compromise is the purity of the rhymes. You will not find the word "bulb" in the data base, because it has no rhymes. "Orange" is another word that is often quoted as having no rhymes, but it has a sort of "onj" sound, which is similar to that in "lunge" and "sponge". You will sometimes find in your results a mixture of "pure" and "near" rhymes.

If you are a serious writer, you would be wise not to throw away your paper rhyming dictionaries. Think of QL-RHYMES as being a quick way of finding suggestions to aid your creativity than as providing full answers. 

QL-RHYMES is a specialist interest software, which means there will be fewer purchasers than for the average QL or Just Words! program. There is no better way to test the usefulness of a program than by the experience of the users. Your comments on possible improvements to the data base will be more than welcome.


END LETTER SEARCHING

A common sense approach to end letter searching is better than a strictly literal approach. 
  
Take the christian name "Geoff". There would be little point in typing in the last three letters to find possible rhymes, as the O is silent. You will also have to choose between typing in  "eff" and "ef". 

In general it is better to type in a longer string of end letters than a shorter, and, if this does not produce a suitable rhyme, to shorten it until sufficient possibilities are produced. For example, if you were looking for rhymes of "Colchester", you could try typing in "chester". This will produce only 3 possible rhymes, all place names.  Now try "ester", which produces 18 words, including some you could use, and then go a stage further and try "ster" which gives 105 words. In this particular search the second possibility of "ester" gives the best compromise between the number of displayed words and the nearness of the rhyme. Try a phonetic search of one of the found words, say "jester", and you will get 20 possible rhymes. 

You may like to practice end letter searching using you own name, those of your family or the town where you live. You will find that with a little practice you can work quickly to find a suitable rhyme. 

If you accidentally go into the wrong searching mode, either press "M" to get the main menu, or if the input screen is empty, just press "ENTER".

Finally never forget, the purpose of QL-RHYMES is not to find all the answers, but to assist your creative thinking.

PRINTING OUT THE RESULTS

You can send the results of a QL-RHYMES search to a printer or file. If you do this, keep pressing the Page DOWN command until the search is finished.

If you send your results to a file, you may find a file of that name already exists. QL-RHYMES will warn you if this happens and display a small menu to choose what you then want to do.

Delete existing file will overwrite the file.

Increment existing file will allow you to retain the existing file by adding an increment to the file name. For example, flp1_filename will become flp1_filename1, and then flp1_filename2. These increments will continue until you change the file name using the output command.

Switch printer off will cancel the printer on command.



The QL-RHYMES data base is a simple ASCII file. It starts with a Line Feed and then all the words of 2 letters are listed alphabetically. Next come the words of 3 letters and so on.

Each word ends with a colon after which there is a string giving the approximate sound of the word. Thus "Rhyme" and "Sponge" appear as:

rhyme:ime
sponge:onj

There are no strict rules governing the phonetic part of the data base. This is for a number of reasons, one being that to have carried out a full phonetic check for every word would have been time intensive with the result that QL-RHYMES would never have been written. It would have required a phonetic character set, which not all QL word processors would be able to display. Again the work involved would have been out of proportion to the likely demand for the program.

If you are feeling brave you could edit the data base or add your own words. If you are a masochist you could even try writing your own data base for, say, a foreign language. However I should warn you that writing the program code was relatively easy. Writing the data base was time consuming and difficult. Should you wish to write your own data base, you are welcome to contact Just Words! for help and advice.


FINAL WORDS

I hope you will find this program a valuable addition to your software collection. Every software author needs feedback. If you have praise, criticism, can suggest an improvement, discover a bug or mistake, please let me know.

As I have written many times before, the QL market may be small, but small is beautiful. And small means the sensible QL trader will have an ear for your needs and problems.

Geoff Wicks
5b Wordsworth Avenue, Sinfin, Derby, DE24 9HQ.
Tel: 01332 - 271366
gwicks@beeb.net




