What now?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:31:27 GMT

So, for quite some time now, I've been working on a Great Project.

It started as something simple: I wanted to take the Irish Annals from the CELT project, and make an index of the names therein. So that I'd have a handy reference on hand at SCA Heraldry meetings where we discuss the historicity of proposed persona names for registration.

( What I have done, and why... )

In summary: I have

one Perl module (actually a small set of interconnecting modules) which provide an SGML parser (and a specific TEI parser, and a specific CELT parser) in pure Perl.
A program which uses (1) to display an SGML file in a human-browseable way (although not yet able to edit or meaningfully search that file).
A program which applies rules from a bespoke language to apply simple transformations to an SGML file (parsed with (1)), sufficient to generate output which is a compilable LaTeX file
A METAFONT font for Gaelic, which includes the full Roman character set and several paleographic characters, in an entire family of shapes. A bit of work with Fontforge can easily turn this into a postscript or truetype font (indeed, I have done this to an older version, and those bits which are displayed in this font in the output from (3) are also displayed in this font on screen when I view it in (2).

And I have a question for those of you in the programming community: now what do I do with them?

None of them are complete to my satisfaction, but then, it's entirely possible that they will never be, if I hide them from the world and continue to do all the work in my copious free time whenever I have a flash of insight or a moment to get into it.

I imagine that the SGML parser module could be submitted to CPAN, and the font to CTAN. But I've been putting it off and putting it off, partially because I don't know where to begin, partially because I'm just really nervous about putting my code out there for others to pick over.

As for the other stuff... Sourceforge? For all that I've been supporting others with subversion and the like, I've never used it in anger myself, and find that worrying about this is yet another excuse to hold off doing anything.

Indeed, I've been meaning to post this cry for advice for weeks now, but kept ... putting it off.

So: what do I do with all this now?

comments

Catsidhe

What now?