Publishing Dictionaries

[Anaphory]

Is there a place to publish dictionaries to?

QuickDic looks like a reasonable app for dropping dictionaries into that we generated from linguistic fieldwork (Alorese Abui – Indonesian right now, possibly to be extended to other eastern Indonesian languages on one side and English on the other side).

It works well so far, but it would be nice to make our dicts available easily through QuickDic's crawler and download function. Do you have (plans for) a repository where one could submit pull requests with links to locations of .quickdic files to, so the app will be aware of them as downloadable dictionaries?

[rdoeffinger]

There is no "crawler". The list of downloadable dictionaries is hard-coded into the app (res/raw/dictionary_info.txt). The reason is mostly that information like number of words, decompressed size etc. wouldn't be available in a "crawler" based download method. I could imagine adding support for manually dropping a secondary such txt file into the download folder, but that would hardly be much more convenient than letting user manually download the dictionaries? Maybe combining it with a download/delete button for "groups" that downloads or deletes such a text file? Would all involve some implementation effort though.

[Anaphory]

Actually, that means I could (in theory) just – once sorted out stable paths, procedures etc. – submit a pull request for a commit against res/raw/dictionary_info.txt.

While that does not strike me as a sustainable and scalable long-term solution, it might suggest that a possible solution might be extracting that particular file (or one like it, to keep your core contributions and possible community contributions like mine separate) and making it available for easier editing, eg. through a gist. Keep that centralized, otherwise there's no advantage.

However, a place to copy-and-paste a download link for a specific dict might be just as useful. My less computer-aware colleague did find it somewhat cumbersome to get the file, which I linked him to, onto his phone by downloading it and then moving it to the correct directory. Without a larger community willing to contribute and curate/moderate a list of third-party dictionaries, I guess that is the best compromise option, and it feels like there is only very small implementation effort to do it.

[rdoeffinger]

One thing that should be simple (while still some implementation effort) to just allow you send around custom dictionaries would be a way to use the "share" feature. The options I could think of (note that I haven't checked if they are possible in exactly this way):

• register for files with .quickdic extension, thus the file can be downloaded and "shared" with the app to install it
• register for https:// links in general and allow downloading dictionaries that way - this might be rather annoying to most users though as it clutters up the "share" list for links
• add a special quickdic-dict:// URL scheme to indicate dictionaries to download Of course a copy-paste field would be possible, but it's not very Android-style way of doing it I think. Any opinion on these?

I think longer-term the better solution is the option to download and install "third-party" dictionary_info.txt files. This might even be desirable for my own dictionaries, as it would allow for updating the list independent from the app itself, but as said this would be some effort and not something to be done near-term.

[rdoeffinger]

Any further comments? What I haven't mentioned yet and is implemented: After downloading a zip file with the dictionary, it is possible to select "open with" in the file manager and select QuickDic and it gets installed.