It wouldn’t be too hard to add support for XHTML and CSS but it would require Fantasdic to depend on a rendering engine like Gecko or Webkit. Unfortunately I have no time to devote to Fantasdic lately so I can’t promise anything.

At home and at work I use Mac OS X for my work and Apple’s Dictionary (I translate quite large quantities of text). What I like about Apple’s Dictionary is that it has a very simple interface (similar to Fantasdic), it is very fast and since version 2.0 Apple gave everyone the possibility to create and add your own dictionaries.

I have created and compiled a few dictionaries that would also greatly help the work of my colleagues – but none of them Mac. I’ve been searching ever since to find some dictionary back-end that could work on Windows XP and read some nice dictionary format. I’ve found only a few programs that have a simple yet powerful interface – Fantasdic is one of them (I like Gnome Dictionary, too).

But something is always missing. The dictionary formats used in all of these applications are too simple. I think, Apple resolved the question in a very elegant way. The source format of the dictionaries is a Unicode-encoded XML file. The definition of this XML is basically XHTML extended with a few dictionary-related tags, typically (with attributes id and d:title, this latter represents the entry), (with two attributes d:value and d:title one of which is used to build the index, the other is what shows up in the result list. You can use multiple d:index tags for one entry, so for example you can find the entry “do” by searching “done”). (This is the open-source part of the dictionary format, as later one uses Apple’s tools to build indexes and to convert the source into a format that Dictionary understands.)

But the point is that they used XHTML as a basis, permitting all the formatting (including images) you can do with XHTML, and the whole dictionary can use a single CSS file. I’ve found no other base dictionary formats that would permit formatting. My question is if you have seen any format like that (I mean with formatting), what applications can read it and if you plan to include a similar format in a future release of Fantasdic?

Thank you for your work!