Using flag diacritics for faster compilation

lexd is a bit slow to compile dictionaries that make use of prefixes with large lexicons (or similar).

To speed this up, you can enable compiling to flag diacritics.

Implementing the change

First thing you want to do is edit your Makefile.am:

• remove autogen.bin and automorf.bin lines from the TARGETS_COMMON list at the top
• add -f as a switch to the lexd commmands
• add -F as a switch to the hfst-compose command in the the automorf.hfst line

Be sure to rerun ./autogen.sh when you're done.

Also make sure to do all of this the same way in your multilingual pair.

The changes will look something like this:

 TARGETS_COMMON =                       \
        $(LANG1).automorf.hfst          \
-       $(LANG1).automorf.bin           \
        $(LANG1).automorf.att.gz        \
        $(LANG1).autogen.hfst           \
-       $(LANG1).autogen.bin            \
        $(LANG1).autogen.att.gz         \
        $(LANG1).autopgen.bin           \
        $(LANG1).rlx.bin            \
        $(LANG1).zhfst

 .deps/$(LANG1).RL.lexd.hfst: .deps/$(LANG1).RL.lexd
-       lexd $< .deps/$(LANG1).RL.lexd.att
+       lexd -f $< .deps/$(LANG1).RL.lexd.att
        hfst-txt2fst .deps/$(LANG1).RL.lexd.att -o $@
 
 .deps/$(LANG1).LR.lexd.hfst: .deps/$(LANG1).LR.lexd
-       lexd $< .deps/$(LANG1).LR.lexd.att
+       lexd -f $< .deps/$(LANG1).LR.lexd.att
        hfst-txt2fst .deps/$(LANG1).LR.lexd.att -o $@

 $(LANG1).automorf.hfst: .deps/$(LANG1).LR.hfst .deps/$(LANG1).spellrelax.hfst
-       hfst-compose -1 $< -2 .deps/$(LANG1).spellrelax.hfst | hfst-invert | hfst-fst2fst -O -o $@
+       hfst-compose -F -1 $< -2 .deps/$(LANG1).spellrelax.hfst | hfst-invert | hfst-fst2fst -O -o $@

Additional steps

Updating modes.xml

You'll want to change all the instances of lt-proc and auto*.bin in your modes.xml file to hfst-proc and auto*.hfst, respectively.

Make sure to do the same in your multilingual pair.

Running hfst-expand and hfst-lookup

You'll also need to add -X obey-flags to hfst-expand or hfst-lookup any time you run those commands.

Running tests

In theory you shouldn't have to do anything extra?

But it's a good idea to run regression tests after implementing these changes!