Re: First weekly status report on GNOME Dictionary

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Reinout,

On Sat, 2005-11-12 at 22:21 +0100, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> Hi Emmanuele,
> 
> Op Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:04:57 +0100, schreef Emmanuele Bassi:

[Different dictionaries]

> - Selecting a different dict server (requires being online, hard to find
> because the server list is not included by default)

We could provide a very simple storage for dictionary servers, with l10n
support; something like the locations for the weather applet - but
*much* smaller; e.g.:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE gnome-dictionary SYSTEM "dictionaries.dtd">
<gnome-dictionary version="1.0">
  <dictionaries>
    <dictionary>
      <!-- Translators: English based dictionary servers -->
      <_language>English</_language>
      <server href="dict.org" port="2628"/>
      ...
    </dictionary>
    <dictionary>
      <!-- Translators: Italian based dictionary servers -->
      <_language>Italian</_language>
      ...
    </dictionary>
...

At this point, we could have a default dictionary server for the user's
locale, and provide a way to change that inside the preferences.

> - Installing dictd on localhost (requires knowing how to install and
> configure one with the right dictionaries).

I agree on this.

> 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.

I'll have to look at the format, and create a parser for these, and -
right now - I'm trying to reformat, audit and consolidate the current
code base, so this could be a milestone for 2.16 instead of 2.14.  But
it's definitely worth to look at and implement, if we can get all the
benefits of a dictionary without having to actually use a server.

Thanks,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi - <ebassi gmail com>
Log: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net