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zehfernandes / wordnote

A simple and elegant notebook to write new words and discover their meanings and synonyms https://wordnote.app
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dict protocol and dict.org #1

Open Eirikur opened 2 years ago

Eirikur commented 2 years ago

I was surprised that these weren't in your feature set, but OH! offline-first is a really good goal. For things like the wordnet and out-of-copyright Webster, you could just look up your existing word list and cache the definitions.

I'm an Emacs user since before there was an internet, so I think in protocols. During the early pre-evil era of Macintosh I had the Random House and the Oxford English dictionaries installed on my hard drive. Imagine that today! It's a rentier thing, I guess.

It's pretty obvious to me that dict protocol has stayed with the old-timers and no web-generation people even know about it. I just thought it would be a good source of out-of-copyright dictionaries for you.

Oh, and look at Project Gutenburg, (I just checked) many Free-As-In-Freedom dictionaries. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=dictionary&submit_search=Go%21

My best to you. I'll take a look at the code. I'm wondering about a port to Linux desktop. Hmm, Electron or webkit might get Windows, Mac and Linux.

Eiríkur

hirako2000 commented 2 years ago

I think the dict protocol is ideal. But I'm sorry the tooling for dict is not. They are like old relics, and don't seem to work on Apple silicon.

Would could make a tool people can actually use, or tell me which tool to use. By people I mean web developers.

unhammer commented 2 years ago

There's quite a lot of dictionaries in the dictd format, e.g. just look at the ones packaged for Debian (including the great 1913 Websters Unabridged Dictionary, but also quite a lot of dictionaries for other languages). So perhaps a conversion script might be useful. Personally I don't feel like supporting the protocol is very useful here – these dictionaries don't get updated often, and the point of the app is to have offline access. But having more dictionaries would be great :)

zehfernandes commented 2 years ago

Hey @Eirikur

Thanks for your feedback. I didn't know about the dict protocol; I will dive in more and look at the packages like @unhammer mentioned. I plan to make different datasets available so the user can choose their preferences.

About the desktop version, it's an excellent idea. I guess it would be faster to create a web app from scratch instead of using the react native web version, but I need to look more carefully to be sure.