I have just found out the Nihongobot Jabber robot. Nihongobot acts as a normal contact you can chat with. The only difference is that you can ask him to look up words for you in EDICT. This means that you can turn your Jabber client into a Japanese dictionary. Very clever idea !
Now what about a bridge Jabber <-> DICT ? It would allow to look up words on DICT servers such as dict.org or nihongobenkyo.org from gaim :-)
A few months ago, I wrote about EPWING dictionaries, a very popular format in Japan. I personally own three commercial dictionaries in this format: Eijiro (English to Japanese), CrownFR (excellent French to Japanese dictionary) and Le Concis JF (Japanese to French).
I wrote a conversion script in order to use them with a dictd server, which means I can now use them with Fantasdic. See for example this screenshot of the excellent CrownFR in Fantasdic:
The script is currently in the Fantasdic CVS and will be shipped with the next release.
Now with those dictionaries and converted stardict dictionaries, I now have very high quality English, French, Chinese and Japanese dictionaries for my daily needs. I am very happy.
The current TODO list for Fantasdic includes:
- Work on a new “matches side pane” which will allow to select and see results in case a query returns many results.
- Add support for Gtk::Print, which will allow to print definitions or export them as PDF.
- Switch from gtk-trayicon to Gtk::StatusIcon, which should bring portability to Windows.
- Add Japanese language specific features such as romaji input and word desinflection through Mecab.
- Close the Nihongo Benkyo project and use nihongobenkyo.org to run a public server with Japanese dictionaries. Include a web interface to query the server.
I am releasing Fantasdic 1.0-beta 2. A lot of love with this release:
- Revamped add dictionary dialog.
- New strategy drop down menu on the main window.
- New stop button in the toolbar.
- New option to choose whether Fantasdic should lookup last word at startup.
- New command-line options.
- Now hold connections form some time and close too old connections.
- New find pane.
- New command-line tools: a basic server, a proxy and some format conversion tools.
I recommend to use ruby-gnome2 0.14.1 or CVS. You may encounter random crashes if you are using ruby-gnome2 0.15…
There is also a new web site : http://www.gnome.org/projects/fantasdic/
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!
I have just tried out Jgloss, a program written in Java that adds annotations to a text written in Japanese.
I have first attempted to run it with free java virtual machines such as gij or kaffe but it did not work. So I resigned myself and finally installed Sun’s java runtime environment. Fortunately, it installs in a directory (which can be in your home directory). That makes the whole thing not too intrusive.
Jgloss works pretty well and is pretty fast. It uses Chasen, a part-of-speech and morphological analyzer to split a sentence into words (Japanese does not use spaces) and EDICT to get the reading and meaning of each word.
I would have appreciated a function to zoom in or something because meanings are very difficult to read.
I had a problem with japanese fonts. I suspect that the fonts selected in the settings are not used for all widgets, especially in the tree view on the right pane.
I would like to add a similar feature to Nihongo Benkyo one day. The only problem I’m seeing is how to display annotations, from a user interface’s perspective. I think pango will be my friend for this purpose.
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.
According to LinuxFR, people from the french Wiktionary project are in the process of adding the 35,000 entries from the 1935 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, which is now public domain. This is great! Aside from that, the french and english “wiktionaries” have already reached the 100,000 entries mark! This is quite impressive but we have to notice that “wikitionaries” are monolingual (definitions) and bilingual (translations into various target languages) at the same time. That’s why for example we can see portuguese words on the french wiktionary… I’m curious to know the advantages of doing that way…
This release fixes a bug that prevented Fantasdic from running under Windows (thanks to Gabriele Renzi for telling me) and some user interface tweaks (thanks to John Spray for the patch).
Screenshot : Fantasdic under Windows
Download : fantasdic-1.0-beta1.1.tar.gz
I’m pleased to announce the first release of Fantasdic, a client for the DICT protocol (a dictionary network protocol, RFC 2229).
