Installing Foma

NB! Support for building fst's using Foma is experimental, and only works with a few languages at the moment. Specifically, the following is required:

  • use an xfst script (suffix .xfscript) for the morphophonological description

Also, only a subset of the total package of fst's are built using foma for now. More fst's will be added over time.

Installation

To install Foma, do the following: 

svn co http://foma.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/foma/ foma-read-only
cd foma
make
sudo make install

Home page

There is a Foma home page, where you may read more about the compiler, and also download binaries (in case you have troubles installing).

Use

To configure a language to be built with foma, do the following: 

./configure --with-foma

To also turn off Xerox (if you have it installed), you can add --without-xfst. The default is to always use the Xerox tools, but if they are not installed, the fallback is to use the Hfst tools if nothing else is specified. Foma must always be enabled explicitly. If Foma is enabled, Hfst is turned off unless you explicitly also enable Hfst.

Differences between Foma and Xfst

There are a number of differences between Foma and Xfst, but most of them are additions on top of Xfst. That is, Xfst-based source files are always compatible with Foma.

There are a couple of exceptions, they are listed here as they are found:

  • do not start an echo string with the character "=" - this turns echo into a defined net with the name echo.