Mathieu's log

First, let me introduce EPWING, a dictionary and encyclopedia format which is quite popular in Japan but still remains almost unknown else where. Development of the format started during the 80s. In 1991 the EPWING Consortium was formed by Fujitsu, Sony, Iwanami and other Japanese IT and publishing companies. In 1996, EPWING was standardized as JIS (Japanese Industry Standard) X4081 and revised in 2001. The EPWING format exists in several versions including such features as sound, movies, compression, etc. and offers various search methods. Versions are backward compatible but not forward compatible.

Now, what is nifty is that many dictionary publishers in Japan actually use this format to sell strict electronic copies of their paper dictionaries! Basically, dictionaries available on the electronic dictionary devices (“denshi jisho”) can be bought in EPWING as well. Among many others, we can for example find the Kenkyusha New Japanese-English, Iwanami Koujien (Japanese monolingual), Sanseido Crown (French-Japanese) and Sanseido Concise (Japanese-French). Of course, as commercial dictionaries, they tend to be very high quality dictionaries. The price is generally the same than their paper version.

I personally purchased Eijiro, the Crown and the Concise that I all three recommend. The Crown was either available alone in EPWING (the easy way) or along with the Concise for the same price but in Btonic (proprietary obscure format, the hard way). I took a risk and chose the hard way. I had to use Ebstudio (Windows only) and the Btonic toolkit to convert them to EPWING. The toolkit didn’t work until I figured out that, for non-unicode programs, it is required to switch the whole system to Japanese mode and of course reboot the machine…

It is possible to build dictionaries in EPWING thanks to FreePWING. As an example, Jim Breen‘s dictionaries have been converted to EPWING.

To consult a dictionary, one needs an EPWING viewer. There exists viewers for many plateforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux), even for handhelds (Zaurus…). Under Linux, I personally use Ebview. Viewers generally require libeb which is surprisingly very fast and supports various search methods (exact match, begin with etc).

Like I said on my journal sooner, I’m planning to write a DICT server that would be easily extendable to support various dictionary formats among which of course EPWING. This should be fairly easy thanks to the ruby bindings for libeb and Ruby’s wonderful socket API. This will allow me to use my great dictionaries with Fantasdic!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Dictionaries, In English, Japanese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.