The problem with KWIC for Greek texts is that Greek fonts to not support single-width fonts, which KWIC uses to align the results more cleanly. In addition, the title lines, which give the bibliographic information and link, can be different lengths and this also causes problems aligning the search terms. See for instance, this search.
To solve the word tag problem I just made a few modifications to the KwicFormat subroutine in philosubs. The main edit there was changing the line that stripped all tags into this:
$bf=~ s#<(?!(w |/w))[^>]*># #gi; #keep only word tags
For the alignment issue, things were more complicated. Keeping track of the length of the left side of the line doesn't allow for a consistent place on the page due to the differing widths of the letters. In the end, I modified artfl_kwic to chop the left side of the hit to a size as close to a certain length as possible without breaking any words. Previously, both the right and the left were chopped to a certain length regardless of breaking words and length including tags, often resulting in very little content. Now, only the length of the display string is accounted for and in addition the length is adjusted for the length of the bibliographic title.
I also added a span around the left and right sides of the hit to allow for positioning and alignment using Javascript (and CSS). Then, adding the following lines to the Results Header, the search terms are all lined up in a neat line:
span.left { right:46%; position:absolute; }
span.right { left:54.5%; position:absolute;
height:18px; overflow:hidden;}
The numbers may look a little messy, but they give nice results. I found that without the decimal, the two sides were a bit too far apart, but there may be another way around that.The extra bits for formatting the right span are in place of trimming the content of the right side in perl as I did for the left side. I found that the overflow:hidden attribute is quite handy if you can get it to work (it is a bit tempermental). As long as it is found in an absolutely positioned object with restricted size, AND it is contained within an element with overflow set to auto, it should work. It simply hides any content that does not fit within the given boundaries. It gives a very clean look to the right side of the page and even adjusts to different window sides so that the content never leaks to the next line.
Take a look at this page and play with the window size to see what I mean. Unfortunately, there is no such nice property for trimming the overflow off of the left side instead of the right side. That is why I did it in perl instead of Javascript. There is a function called clip in javascript which is designed to clip an image, but again the way it works makes it much easier to trim from the right side than the left side. One could probably twist the clip function enough to make something similar happen for the left side (and make everything nicely adjustable and lovely), but for now, it is happening in perl. (I tried for a while, but my concoctions just seemed to slow things down and not add anything exciting results).
UPDATE: I couldn't resist playing a bit more with the javascript, and now it works like I wanted it to! Now, if you click on the link above, it won't illustrate what I said it would, because the javascript has been improved. I added this function:
function trimKwicLines(){
var contentwidth = $(".content").width();
$(".left").each(function (i) {
var width = $(this).width();
var leftoffset = contentwidth*.4 - width*1 - 2;
$(this).css("left", leftoffset);
});
}
And changed things here and there in the CSS.
AWESOME!!
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