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I few years ago we evaluated Lectrix rather carefully in comparison with
Alpheios. Its chief advantage was the same as its chief disadvantage, it
linked into the Cambridge commentaries and texts and did not work
effectively with anything else, while the Alpheios tools had no access to
the Cambridge commentaries but worked with any html found anywhere. Michael
Sharp and I had some exploratory discussions about collaboration , but
their reliance at the time on Adobe flash was an obstacle. I heard
indirectly that they planned to abandon flash, for which there is surely
less and less justification, but there was also some concern among the
several institutions that were evaluating it on a trial basis that they had
too few commentaries available to justify the price, and the pipeline for
producing new commentaries was so venerably ponderous that rectification of
this situation seemed unlikely in the near future. If Lectrix had been free
and somewhat differently designed, with somewhat broader functionality, we
probably would not have bothered creating alpheios, since the fundamental
purpose- providing a flexible reading support environment for students and
scholars was quite similar. In the meantime alpheios has added support for
Arabic and  Biblical Greek and hopes soon to add similar support for
several other classical languages that a scholar might plausibly wish to
consult simultaneously, eg Syriac and Hebrew. At this moment in time a
reading environment that is focused exclusively on Greek and Latin would
seem to be a bit narrow even for scholars who work primarily with Greek and
Latin- IMHO.  But perhaps the latest Lectrix is significantly enhanced, in
which case Cambridge might want to emphasize its novelty more emphatically
than its web site does at the moment.


On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:07 PM, Charles E. Jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>  Do any of you have opinions (aside from on the price) on the Cambridge
> product Lectrix?
> http://lexctrix.cambridge.org
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Chuck Jones-
>
>