pybycus is a Python 3 package to parse the Ibycus format, used by the PHI & TLG CD-ROMs.
Despite the notoriety they have acquired along the years, the documentation is rather scarce and it takes many a days to get acquainted with their inner format. We have not yet completely succeeded in that regard.
Other tools exist, and were of great help in our endeavor. It is however difficult to understand the specifications of the format by simply reading their code. Most of their developers actually had no access to any documentation. The unexpected recent publication of some official documents tremendously sped up our efforts.
The code was therefore written with two purposes in mind: not only implement a tool that can be used to extract the information from the files; but also document how they can be parsed. Python is in our view a great language as it allows one to concentrate on the high-level approach—despite a consequent loss of performance.
Our work is still new. We have only worked with Latin texts and not processed beta codes yet. The output is not defined and will change. A lot remains to be done, but we found the library mature enough to be published without blushing.
We hope it will be useful to the small community of modern scholars.
import pybycus.authtab
authtab = pybycus.authtab.content("./AUTHTAB.DIR")python3 -m pybycus.authtab ./AUTHTAB.DIR
import pybycus.idt
idt = pybycus.idt.content("./LAT0474.IDT")python3 -m pybycus.idt ./LAT0474.IDT
import pybycus.txt
txt = pybycus.txt.content("./LAT0914.TXT")python3 -m pybycus.txt ./LAT0914.TXT
We would like to thank the following projects, which proved very helpful in guiding our implementation and checking our results:
This project would never have been completed without all those who provided us with documents and more especially, again, P. J. Heslin who released some of the PHI & TLG documentation.
Last but not least, we express our gratitude to the Packard Humanities Institute and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project. Their dream still lives on half a century later, and we sincerely hope they would support our work.
This code was written to be shared.
Please check the LICENSE file that comes with the code.