Mathieu's log

Fantasdic has been added to the GNOME Translation Project (GTP) last week. As a result, Fantasdic now has its own translation status page.

The hope is that Fantasdic will benefit more translations and that translations will be easier to maintain on the long term, with members of the GTP having access to the Fantasdic repository. With external translators, I have to email them new .po files and commit their translations. Currently only a Spanish translation has been contributed (in addition to the existing Brazilian Portuguese, Breton (!), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Occitan (!), Serbian and Swedish ones). This is less than I would have hoped but this is a good start.

To make it perfectly clear, here I’m talking about translations of the user interface. It doesn’t have anything to do with dictionary data.

Yesterday I’ve added user documentation support to Fantasdic, as can be found in the Help > Contents menu of most GNOME applications. This is not an area developers are generally willing to spend much time for because what is documented sometimes sounds like trivial (“to look up a word in the dictionary, enter your word in the search entry and press enter”) but I think that this is definitely important for adoption of Fantasdic in major distributions. Writing comprehensive, concise and clear documentation, in addition to adding all the required infrastructure in the program, is in itself a difficult exercise so I ended up spending a fair amount of time for that. I also improved my knowledge of Docbook and learned about scrollkeeper and OMF while doing it. I definitely didn’t waste my time.

When available, the documentation is displayed using yelp, the GNOME help viewer, otherwise (Windows, KDE) the HTML version of the documentation is displayed in the default browser.

Oh, by the way, the documentation is not yet totally complete, so here’s a bunch of useful commands if ever you’re willing to help with documentation:

Check the validity of the document:
$ xmllint –noout –noent –valid fantasdic.xml

Transform the document:
$ xsltproc –noout -o output stylesheet.xsl fantasdic.xml

Visualize the document:
$ yelp -p /full/path/to/fantasdic.xml

Create a .po (translation) file:
$ xml2po -o LANG.po ../C/fantasdic.xml

Merge back the changes to fantasdic.xml:
$ xml2po -p LANG.po -o fantasdic.xml ../C/fantasdic.xml

Update an existing .po file:
$ xml2po -u LANG.po ../C/fantasdic.xml

Convert to HTML:
$ xmlto -o html-dir html fantasdic.xml

Fantasdic 1.0-beta4 released

I’ve just released Fantasdic 1.0-beta4. Fantasdic is a dictionary application that uses the network to look up words. For example, nihongobenkyo.org is a server that provides Japanese dictionaries. Add it to the settings in Fantasdic and voilà, you can now look up Japanese words using Fantasdic. Another well-known server with tons of dictionaries is dict.org.

What’s new with this release?

- Print support.
- New match dialog.
- New history dialog.
- Can choose fonts in the preferences.
- Zoom+, Zomm-, Zoom normal buttons.
- New “Zoom over character” dialog.
- Better handling of connections and cache.
- Better support of authentication.
- SOCKS 5 Proxy support.
- New application icon.
- Various bug fixes.
- Better MS Windows support and easy to install archive.

- French translation updated (Mathieu Blondel).
- Brazilian Portuguese translation updated (Alexandre Cavedon).
- Swedish translation updated (Daniel Nylander).
- Occitan translation updated partially (Yannig Marchegay).

Source: fantasdic-1.0-beta4.tar.gz [123 KB]
Windows: fantasdic-1.0-beta4-mswin32.zip [15.5 MB]

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Since my last post, MaemoCJK has been released for beta-testing with support for Japanese/Chinese handwriting recognition, together with a few new interesting features such as switch between input methods at runtime.

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