NAME

       Artha - An cross-platform thesaurus based on WordNet

DESCRIPTION

       Artha is an open thesaurus based on the WordNet database, created with simplicity in mind. Once executed,
       Artha monitors for a user preset global hotkey combination. When  the  user  selects  some  text  in  any
       window, and presses this hotkey combo, Artha looks up WordNet thesaurus for the selected text and pops-up
       with the results.

       When executed for the first time Artha tries to register a hotkey automatically, in the order, Ctrl + Alt
       +  [W  or  A  or  T  or Q]. You can view/change it via the 'Hotkey' button in the toolbar. It can also be
       disabled.

DEFINITIONS

       Definitions are categorized based on the PoS (Part of Speech - Noun, Verb, Adjective and  Adverb).  Apart
       from  showing  the definitions/senses of a searched string with usage examples, Artha also shows a word's
       relatives like Synonyms, Antonyms,  Derivatives,  Pertainyms  (Related  noun/verb),  Attributes,  Similar
       Terms,  Domain/Domain  Terms, Causes, Entails, Hypernyms (is a kind of), Hyponyms (Kinds), Holonyms (is a
       part of), Meronyms (Parts).

   SENSES AND RELATIVES
       A word can have more then one sense i.e. it can convey more than a  single  meaning/definition.  Relative
       words  are  words  that  are  related  to one or more senses of the searched word, by a relationship like
       Synonym, Derivative, etc. To know which all sense a relative is related  to,  just  select  the  it,  the
       corresponding senses it maps to are highlighted. As per WordNet, depending on the number of senses a word
       has (polysemy count), it's familiarity is determined. It gets displayed next to the PoS in the definition
       area.  There  are 7 types: extremely rare, very rare, rare, uncommon, common, familiar, very familiar and
       extremely familiar.

MODES

       Artha has 2 modes. Simple and Detailed. Artha enters Detailed mode when  the  'Detailed'  button  in  the
       toolbar  is  pressed.  When  toggled  again, it returns back to simple mode. For relatives like Antonyms,
       Pertainyms, Hypernyms, Hyponyms, Holonyms and Meronyms, where more than one level  of  relatives  may  be
       present,  is  showed  in a tree fashion, in detailed mode. If in simple mode, only one level of relatives
       are shown even when more levels are present. E.g. 'rich' has 'poor'  and  'lean'  alone  as  antonyms  in
       simple mode. While in detailed mode, 'poor' further infers broke, skint, etc. which are shown as children
       of 'poor'.

REGULAR EXPRESSIONS BASED SEARCH

       Regular expressions can be used to search for a term when you vaguely know it and want to  locate  it  in
       the  thesaurus.  Artha's  regular expression pattern closely follows Wildmat syntax by Rich Salz owing to
       its simplicity.

              * (wildcard) matches any number of (including 0) unknown characters

              ? (joker) matches one unknown character

              [...] (range) matches one unknown character within the range specified

              {m, n} (limits) upper & lower limits of the number of characters in a range

              [^...] (not in the range) matches one unknown character NOT within the range specified

              EXAMPLES:

              Expr. `cro*p` means the term you want to corner starts with `cro` and  ends  with  `p`  while  the
              number  of  characters  in between are unknown. It fetches crop, crop up, croup, crock up and crow
              step.

              Expr. `*chester` means the searched word ends with a `chester` while the beginning and its  number
              characters are unknown. It fetches chester, manchester, rochester, winchester and toy manchester.

              Expr. `can????r` means the term sought starts with `can` and ends with `r` while you are sure that
              there are 5 unknown characters in between.  It fetches canister and cannular.

              Expr. `andre*[x|y|z]` means the word searched for starts with andre and ends with either an x or y
              or  z,  and  there could be any number of terms in betweem these. It fetches andre malraux, andrei
              tarkovsky, andres martinez, etc.

              Expr. `a[c|d|e]{2,}` means the word looked for starts with a and then there are minimum 2 or  more
              occurrences of c, d or e. It fetches acc, accede, ace, add, ade and aec.

OPTIONS

       Look-ups  made in Artha are stored permanently as a per-user setting, and can be saved via the popup menu
       of the search bar or can be cleared too.  Other options like showing term familiarity based  on  polysemy
       count, display of status icon, etc. can be changed via the Options window.

NOTIFICATIONS

       Should  the user prefer passive desktop notifications (balloon tips), rather than the application popping
       up with the definitions, it can be done by enabling Notifications. This  is  done  via  the  Notify  tool
       button  or  by  right-clicking on Artha's system tray icon, and tick off the 'Notifications' check box in
       the menu. When notifications are enabled, and the user selects text in a window and  presses  the  hotkey
       combo,  Artha  takes the prime definition of that term from WordNet and shows that definition as a system
       tray notification.

       Note: For the notifications feature to be present, notify library's  binary  (libnotify.so.1)  should  be
       available  on your system. If not, Artha will not expose the feature at all. Also the notification-daemon
       should installed for the notifications to show up.

SUGGESTIONS

       Suggestions is a feature that gives out possible near matches when a misspelled word is searched for.  To
       have  this  feature, your system should have libenchant binary (libenchant.so.1) installed and an English
       dict file for the spell engine to refer (locale doesn't matter).

AVAILABILITY

       Artha has a World Wide Web site at http://artha.sourceforge.net. From this web site users can  know  more
       about the Artha project and also download its source and binary distributions for various distros.

AUTHOR

       Sundaram Ramaswamy <legends2k@yahoo.com>