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

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 04:18:04AM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
[...]
> 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.

I would design it slightly differently -- not assigning so much work to
the control center. The control center can provide a nice way to _set_
the dictionary preferences. However, it then just stores the preferences
in the configuration system (gconf, probably via bonobo-conf) and
something else does the lookup. The actual work gets done by another
module. But that's mere details. :)

> 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?

The only fiddly part that I can see is needing to provide a front end to
each of the different dictionaries/glossaries, since interaction with
each will be slightly different. Still, that's not too hard and most of
them won't change very often.

> Anybody interested in hacking on this?

Well, yes, but it's about item number 78 on my list, so I'll never get
to it. :-(

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

Agreed.

Cheers,
Malcolm

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