Mathieu's log

So you are interested in the DICT protocol and would like to know where to find some interesting tools and data to use with your favourite DICT client (e.g. Fantasdic…)? I have made a bunch of tools that you should have a look at!

Stardict dictionary to dictd database converter

Stardict is a well-known dictionary application for the GNOME desktop. Contrary to Fantasdic, it does not use the network to fetch definitions on a server (it is not a DICT client) but it has a very large collection of dictionaries : English-English, French-French, English<->Chinese, Englisgh<->Japanese, Russian etc…

With this tool, you can use all those stardict dictionaries with a dictd server and thus with Fantasdic. I think the client-server model is really better and more enjoyable when it comes to dictionary applications.

Ideally, someone may start a public DICT server with all those dictionaries. But it is always possible to run one’s own dictd server on one’s local machine.

I myself run my own server and have also installed a CGI interface so I can use my dictionaries both from Fantasdic and a web interface, depending on the place where I am (home or else where).

Japanese dictionaries

I have made similar converters for Jim Breen’s well-known Japanese dictionaries : EDICT, Kanjidic2 and the Tanaka Corpus (Japanese-English sentences). All those dictionaries become usable with Fantasdic!

DICT proxy

In many companies, only few ports such as HTTP (80) and FTP (21) are open. This prevents from using DICT clients (2628) inside those companies. So I have made a little DICT proxy server. Here how it works. You run the proxy server on your computer and set a CGI script on an HTTP server (the proxy and the CGI are in the same file). When your client queries the proxy, the proxy performs an HTTP request on the CGI interface and it is the CGI interface that performs the query on the actual DICT server. The CGI outputs the result, the DICT proxy reads it and transmits it to your client. In short, it is a DICT, over HTTP, proxy.

DICT server

I have made a basic extendable DICT server. Basically, you just have to write a simple class which defines the define, match and avail_strats methods in order to add support for a new database format.

Download

All those tools are published under GPL, made in Ruby and available in the Fantasdic CVS, tools/ directory.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Dictionaries, In English, Projects, Ruby. 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.