Getting started
Download Andromeda from one of the two mirrors:
Then drag the application from the disk image to your Applications folder. Start Andromeda. All you need to do by way of setup is tell Andromeda where your (legally licensed) TLG-E and/or PHI 5 databases are. If you have them on CD-ROM the way most people do, just insert the disc and Andromeda will automatically detect them.
Then you get to the really fun part.
Tabbed browsing
Andromeda has tabbed reading, so you can effortlessly flip back and forth between Vergil and Servius, Homer and Eustathius and Venetus A, Aeschylus and Euripides. You can move tabs between windows and drag them out into their own separate windows. Best of all, you can define a corpus of texts (think iTunes playlist) and then open them all up in a single tabbed window.
Once Andromeda has Perseus’ collection of translations and commentaries at your disposal, you’ll be able to move between them effortlessly and “pin” one tab’s movement to another. As you’re reading the actual text, the translation and commentary, if available, will scroll invisibly, so every time you change tabs the text is “synced up.” No more fumbling paper commentaries and translations — in Andromeda they’ll keep up with you as you read.
Smart Corpora
Andromeda also has Smart Corpora. Just define a set of criteria (language is Greek, genre is epic) and Andromeda will find them all out for you. Once Andromeda has a full-text search engine, think how easy it will be for you to target the texts you’re actually interested in rather than slogging through endless results from Nonnus. Or, if you’re interested in Nonnus, you can turn off Callimachus and Homer.
Lexical tools
Andromeda comes with Perseus’ morphology tools built-in along with the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon for Greek and Lewis-Short for Latin. Just right-click a word and ask for it to be parsed. Andromeda does the rest.
Searching texts
Andromeda doesn’t do a full-corpus text search just yet, but it gives you everything you need to search through a single text. There are three supported search modes: literal, whole word, and lemmatic. Literal search looks for exactly what you entered without considering word boundaries, so a search for arma will also match perarmatus. A whole word search for arma will only match arma.
By far the most powerful search mode in Andromeda is lemmatic search. In this mode, you enter a dictionary headword and Andromeda will try to find all inflected forms of that word in the document. It’s still highly experimental, though, so don’t be surprised if you hit a hiccup or two on the way.
"Odi" finds "oderim." Is that useful to you?
Handout Maker
The real showoff plugin for Andromeda right now is the Handout Maker. You’ve probably had one of those moments in your career where you had about five minutes to throw together a five-page handout; now you don’t have to worry anymore:
All you have to do is select the author, text, and edition, and then provide the citations. Andromeda does the rest. Once you’re done, just click “Save As” and you’re done. You can name the file with either a .rtf or a .doc extension depending on what format you want, but all modern word processors speak both languages.
Now the worst part of that five minutes will be wondering what to do with the other four.
(NB: don’t abbreviate your citations! If you tell Andromeda 1.1-5 instead of 1.1-1.5, it will get confused and engage in what programmers like to call “undefined behavior.” This is a bug to be fixed in the future.)
Preferences
Andromeda separates the two fonts it uses to display Greek and Latin text, so you don’t need to choose Gentium or another font that supports both character sets — you can set each one individually.
That concludes the tour for now. Please exit through our gift shop.
