MWAHAHAHAHA! I just pulled off a really neat Emacs
hack. <grin> It’s Japanese-related. So I’ve been
translating this document for the past two days. It’s really slow
and boring work because there’s no soft copy, so I have to write
the characters (blurry because this is a photocopy of a
photocopy) using the mouse, and hope I don’t make any mistakes
along the way. In the course of copying down kanji (Chinese
characters) for later translation, I created a spreadsheet with
two columns: the kanji word and the number of the slide it
appears on. Then I exported that to CSV, opened that in Emacs,
and wrote an Emacs Lisp function that split the words up into
individual characters. I passed this through
shell-command-on-region to sort and uniquify the characters. I
then went back to the CSV with words and slide numbers, wrote
another Emacs Lisp function that searched edict (Jim Breen’s
electronic Japanese dictionary) for the words, split the word
into individual characters, and filed the word info under each
character, also marking words that were not found in the
dictionary. After that, I wrote yet another function to add table
markup and individual character definitions to each line, then
copied the result into an HTML file.

This should probably be rewritten as a Perl script.

;; Generate the list of characters
;; Use add-all to add all the words to the list
;; call sacha/kanji/format-kanji-with-references

(defvar sacha/kanji/output-file "~/tmp/kanji")

(defun sacha/kanji/process-csv ()
  (interactive)
  (sacha/kanji/split-dictionary)
  (sacha/kanji/add-all)
  (sacha/kanji/format-kanji-with-references))

(defun sacha/kanji/split-dictionary ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((buffer (current-buffer)))
    (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect sacha/kanji/output-file)
      (erase-buffer)
      (insert-buffer-substring buffer)
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward "^\"\\([^\"]+\\)\":" nil t)
        (delete-region (match-end 1) (line-end-position))
        (goto-char (line-beginning-position))
        (delete-char 1)
        (while (not (eolp))
          (forward-char 1)
          (unless (bolp)
            (insert "\n"))))
      (goto-char (line-beginning-position))
      (delete-matching-lines "^\\s-*$")
      (shell-command-on-region (point-min) (point-max) "sort | uniq"  nil t))))

(defun sacha/kanji/add-all ()
  (interactive)
  (while (not (eobp))
    (sacha/add-word)
    (forward-line 1)))

(defun sacha/kanji/format-kanji-with-references ()
  "Add character meaning and table markup."
  (interactive)
  (find-file sacha/kanji/output-file)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (while (not (eobp))
    (goto-char (line-beginning-position))
    (unless (= (char-after (point)) ?<)
      (forward-char 1)
      (let* ((kanji (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (point)))
             (definition (sacha/kanji/find-definition kanji)))
        (when definition
          (save-excursion
            (forward-char -1)
            (insert ""))
          (insert "")
          (insert definition)
          (goto-char (line-end-position))
          (insert ""))))
    (forward-line)))

(defun sacha/kanji/find-definition (kanji)
  "Look up kanji definition."
  (with-current-buffer
      (find-file-noselect "/usr/share/edict/kanjidic")
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (when (and (search-forward kanji)
               (re-search-forward "\\({[^}]+}\\( {[^}]+}\\)+\\)"))
      (match-string 0))))  ;; kanji definitions

(defun sacha/kanji/lookup-word (key)
  "Return the definition of the current word. Ensure edict is loaded before running this."
  (with-current-buffer edict-buffer
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (when (re-search-forward (concat "^" key " \\[\\([^]]+\\)\\] /\\(.*\\)") nil t)
      (list (match-string 1) (match-string 2)))))

(defun sacha/add-word ()
  "Look up this word's definition and add the word to individual character entries."
  (interactive)
  (when (looking-at "^\"\\([^\"]+\\)\".*?:\\([0-9]+\\)")
    (let ((word (match-string 1))
          (slide (match-string 2))
          definition
          chars)
      (setq definition (sacha/kanji/lookup-word word))
      (setq chars (split-string word "" t))
      (while chars
        (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect sacha/kanji/output-file)
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (when (re-search-forward (concat "^" (car chars)) nil t)
            (goto-char (line-end-position))
            (insert "
S:" slide " " word "")
            (if definition
                (insert " " (elt definition 0) ""
                        " " (elt definition 1) "")
              (insert "???"))))
        (delete (car chars) chars)
        (setq chars (cdr chars))))))