[Sugar-devel] Dictionary everywhere ?

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 02:10, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> I was wondering about having a global "dictionary" key in sugar, just
>> like the view source key. When you select a word (or words), and press
>> that key, a window should pop up, showing the meaning of that word (or
>> those words). There can be a control panel entry to choose what
>> dictionary to use (eg: someone might want to have a English-Spanish
>> dictionary instead of a English-English one, etc).
>> I did a bit of hacking last weekend to come up with a rough mockup for
>> the feature.
>> There's a screencast at
>> http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/global_dictionary.ogv
>> (it works with all activities, and not just with Browse - and the
>> window pops up when I press the key)
>> Does it make sense for Sugar ? If it does, I think I can beat it into
>> shape over the next few weekends.
>
> Looks really great, congrats!
>

Thank you very much :)

> I'm adding it to the topics of the next design meeting, which may be
> next weekend.
>

Sounds good. I am looking forward to some ideas about the UI.

> Btw, which external dependencies brings? How would it work in
> multilingual environments?
>

Right now I am using python-dictdlib[1] to get the definitions from a
dictd formatted database[2]. It may probably make sense to turn the
definition and dictionary management part into a desktop independent
dbus based library, and have a sugar control panel extension and a
globalkey/deviceicon extension to leverage that.
Alternatively, we can also consider using a web-based approach, where
we query dict.org (this means that we won't have to ship the large
dictionary dumps) - but I don't want to rely on a internet connection
being present for this feature to be usable.

As for multilingual environments, I propose to have a control panel
extension which would let the user choose which dictionary to use. I
think would be similar to the speech module:
http://interdimensionmedia.com/scratch/settings-10.jpg

Thanks,
Sayamindu



[1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/python-dictdlib
[2] http://www.dict.org/w/databases/start
-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]