Workflow - adamb924/mortal-engine GitHub Wiki

In the course of developing a morphological model, you're going to be keeping track of a few files:

  • The morphology file (which you created)
  • The test file (which you created)
  • The output file (which Mortal Engine creates)
  • The error log file (which Mortal Engine creates)

I keep these files open in Visual Studio Code, Microsoft's general-purpose code editor. I like it because it makes it easy to edit XML files, and because it handles mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text easily.

When I want to capture some kind of morphological behavior, I write the tests first. Then I modify the model and try to make it all work.

I actually keep two test files. The “short” test file contains whatever tests I am working on at the moment. Whenever I am done with those tests, I append them to the “long” test file, which then becomes a sort of an archive of tests. Then I run the long test file occasionally to make sure that none of my later edits have broken my earlier results.

Visual Studio Code will really help you write the XML files. If you have the XSD files in the same folder as your input files, it will check the format of your files, and also offer auto-complete. The latter makes it much faster to write the files. If Visual Studio Code didn't have these capabilities, I probably would have written a GUI for all of this by now. As it is, it's just as easy to write it in XML.