dict related programs

I've always liked the dictionary tools from dict.org. I've been using them with free and private dictionaries since long time ago. I'm mostly interested in offline usable dictionaries, so I didn't work with the communications protocol. I got most interest in the dictionary files (those .dict and .index). I really like that they are text-only files with a nice binary search algorithm looking for matches. Here I present some tools I use related to Dict.

Electronizing esperanto dictionaries

I'd like to have a large amount of dictionaries in dictd-format, so I can check them all quickly. In esperanto still many dictionaries are published only in paper form. Since I think it would help if esperanto could be used more often as a communication bridge, I'm interested in having free electronic versions of that kind of translation dictionaries. Check the electronizing esperanto dictionaries project here

Jdict - J2ME MIDP 1.0 Offline Dictionaries for mobile phones

I wrote an open source dictionary engine for my phone. Here are its features:

• The engine understands the same .index and .dict files as dictd.
• A script allows me packaging any dictd dictionary into a JAR mobile program archive.
• It works quite fast even in old phones.
• I wrote my own transliteration systems, because my phone doesn't allow me enter many symbols I need for the languages I'm interested in. So I have ASCII-Esperanto, ASCII-Русский, ASCII-Magyar, ...
• I build everything in Linux, using the Sun free toolkit for J2ME devices.

I started jdict related to using esperanto dictionaries in mobile phones. I wrote the program using mostly esperanto words, so a person not capable understanding that language, may have problems understanding its source code. Nevertheless, you can check its version repository and the release v0.3.2 (19/8/2007). I wrote the main interface in esperanto, but you can switch it to Catalan or Russian using: Agordoj - (change the language) - Konservi.

Here is a table of the redistributable dictionaries I use with success:

Dictre - unix filtering for dictd-files definitions

I found many dictionaries with huge spaces in the definitions for each word. Also often I found the headword searched written again in the definition. As I use dictd-format dictionaries in my mobile phone, I prefer the dictionaries to be as dense as possible. That's why I wrote dictre (stands for Regular Expression). Now it does two tasks:

• It looks for identical definitions in the definition file, and rewrites the index taking out all any duplicates.
• It allows filtering each definition in the dictionary using a unix program. It calls that unix program passing the definition though stdin, and reads the new filtered definition from its stdout. I usually write sed scripts for that filtering, but any kind of executable will work.
• It sorts any dictionary index not sorted initially.

I could reduce the size of many dictionaries of my interest, using dictre. Check its version repository here.

Akcentiga - easy reading in Russian

Those adults who study Russian may find the same difficulties I find:

• I rarely guess the accented syllable in new words.
• Too often I find new words.
• I forget meanings of learnt words.

I prepared a CGI web page (akcentiga) which, given a text, creates quickly a single HTML answer with noted accented syllables (using an ortographical dictionary) and quick translations (in esperanto and English) on click over any word. After getting the HTML, it doesn't require online connection to check the word meanings.

You can find its C source code in the same repository as dictre.