Re: First weekly status report on GNOME Dictionary

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hi Emmanuele,

Op Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:04:57 +0100, schreef Emmanuele Bassi:

> Containing the status of the review-slash-breaking-slash-rewrite process
> of the GNOME Dictionary application and applet.  

Great to see you're working on this! :)

> and have my definition of "GNOME" with no fuss (yes, I know that there
> already is "dict", but what's the point of having a dictionary client in
> GNOME if I also have to install dict?).

Let me take this opportunity to point out one of my long-time annoyances
with gnome-dictionary. It's documented in
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167366 but the quick summary is:
Supporting the dict protocol is great, but dict.org only offers an English
dictionary. This renders it all but useless for non-English users who
would like to lookup words in their language. There are some workarounds:

- Selecting a different dict server (requires being online, hard to find
because the server list is not included by default)
- Installing dictd on localhost (requires knowing how to install and
configure one with the right dictionaries).

As an alternative, I suggest supporting the StarDict dictionary format.
StarDict itself is a nice program but not quite GNOME HIG-compliant.
The nice thing about StarDict dictionaries is that they can be installed
on a users' machine without the need for daemons. In my opinion, this
could bring gnome-dictionary to a much larger audience.

regards,

-- 
Reinout van Schouwen