Re: glossary (was: Re: GNOME 2 tasks)

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On 4 Oct 2001, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> On Thu, 2001-10-04 at 06:30, Alexander Kirillov wrote:
> > Ideal scenario: you right-click on any word you do not know, select
> > "look it up in the glossary", and if found, it'd produce a small
> > floating window containing the def'n of this word from the
> > glossary. Or the definition shows up in a separate pane of the doc
> > browser - something like this.
> >
> > How realistic is this?
>
> Couldn't this be done similar to how the googlizer works?  You highlight
> the word you want to look up, and click on a "glossary" button.  It can
> spawn a new window with the term and the definition.

I'm really glad Sasha remembered and renewed the discussion of automatic
lookup of words.  It would be really nice.

Let's start by limiting our scope to help browsers. So, the user
highlights a word and then uses some keybindings, right-clicking, or menu
choosing to do the lookup.  Whichever way they do it, they can potentially
select a dictionary (GNOME dictionary, KDE dictionary, Linux dictionary,
ispell dictionary, Websters dictionary, ...).  In principal, it could be
an installed dictionary or one accessible over the Net.  A really nice way
to do this would be to have a Control Center capplet which allows you to
specify dictionaries, both on your system and on the Net.  Then your
documentation browser (or potentially other applications as well) finds
out what dictionaries are available and provides the list to the user to
select from.  Presumably the Control Center will also define a default
dictionary, and even have a fall-back mechanism if the desired dictionary
is unavailable (eg. when you aren't connected to the Net).  I don't know
enough about dictionaries or the control center to know how the lookup
should be done... hopefully the control center capplet can provide a
simple library to do the lookup and return the definition to the
application as a string.  Then the help browser or application pops up a
little window with the definition, shows it in the status bar, or
whatever.  Thus, all the real code goes into the capplet and any
application or help browser can use it with minimal work.

This actually doesn't sound tremendously difficult for somebody who knows
what they are doing (ie. not me;).  Anybody care to comment on how
difficult this really is?

Anybody interested in hacking on this?

This may be a good candidate for gnome-love, provided this approach
doesn't suck.

Dan