Displaying Greek in Beta code is straightforward but not particularly friendly to the reader. Java-enabled browsers can run an applet that presents Beta code as Greek letters. Finally, GIF images containing pictures of Greek can be placed in the forms. The choice of display methods is made at the SOL server. The display preferences of a participant are elicited at login time and used throughout the session.
All databases are currently flat files in Ascii.
This choice of formats makes the data machine-independent and allows for attribute values with arbitrary length. The central database holds translations. As the translation grows, the production translation database will be subdivided into multiple files. When a translator or editor modifies a translation, the software removes the entire entry from the translation database and places a new copy at the end. The cost of these operations is linear in the size of the database file involved.