A new release of Elefas Indicus (the version in Perl) is published today.

Initially the idea was that Elefas Indicus was only a draft which would be replaced by Elefas Maximus once the file filters (Spongiae) would be mature enough.

Now I try a new approach.
Elefas Indicus is designed to have minimal dependencies - only Perl, XML::Parser, DBI, and DBD::Pg (Postgresql). Initially it supported only TXT format files to make queries. It was clear from the beginning that users may want to support lot of formats (office documents, html, etc.) but supporting them would be the most time-consuming part of this development and that it would be done only in a separate library.
In the meantime XLIFF has become more and more popular in the Computer Assisted Translation industry so we can consider that supporting only XLIFF would not be totally ridiculous. The more, there are more and more tools which create XLIFF files and/or use it as intermediate format, so lot of people may not want to be dependent from the one choosen by me.
That is the reason why Elefas Indicus now supports XLIFF (version 1 and 2) as an entry. And contrarily to Elefas Maximus, it supports the possibility to call an external tool to produce XLIFF from another format, which guarantees to you that all parameters (tags and segmentation) will be as with your favorite tool.

In other terms:

• if you search a tool which supports lot of formats out of the box, use Elefas Maximus in cooperation with our Spongiae library ;
• if you already have another tool to produce XLIFF files, then preferably use Elefas Indicus, and eventually look in the configuration file if you can call your favorite converter directly (examples provided in the archive)

In theory Elefas Indicus and Maximus should use the same database now, and differ only by the applicative code itself. Actually this is not strictly true, since Elefas Maximus received lot of recent changes which I did not port to Elefas Indicus. Properties, for example, are not yet supported by Elefas Indicus. But the idea is to come to convergence progressively.

Also the web interfaces are still separated but this is not a goal, Consociata may support Elefas Indicus in the future and make the old one in Perl definitively obsolete.