Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for StarDict

Stardicter 1.1, the set of scripts to convert some freely available dictionaries to StarDict format, has been released today. The biggest change is that it will also keep source data together with generated dictionaries. This is good for licensing reasons and will also allow to actually build these as packages within Debian.

Full list of changes:

• Various cleanups for first stable release.
• Fixed generating of README for dictionaries.
• Added support for generating source tarballs.
• Fixed installation on systems with non utf-8 locale.

As usual, you can install from pip, download source or download generated dictionaries from my website. The package should be soon available in Debian as well.

Stardicter 0.11, the set of scripts to convert some freely available dictionaries to StarDict format, has been released today. There are mostly minor changes and it's time to push them out in official release. The most important being fixed sorting of ascii dictionaries, what did break searching in some programs.

Full list of changes:

• Improved deaccent filter.
• Fixed sorting of ASCII dictionaries.

As usual, you can install from pip, download source or download generated dictionaries from my website.

Stardicter 0.10, the set of scripts to convert some freely available dictionaries to StarDict format, has been released today. There are mostly minor changes and it's time to push them out in official release.

There is one change worth mentioning though - the original site for English - Czech dictionary (http://slovnik.zcu.cz/) has stopped to work and has been moved to https://www.svobodneslovniky.cz/. Hopefully this new location will live at least as long as the original one and will bring back new contributors (honestly the original dictionary gained mostly spam entries in last months). The dictionary data are now hosted in Git repository on GitHub.

For quite some time I maintain set of scripts to convert some freely available dictionaries to StarDict format. I think it's time to make it easily available to others as well, so it has seen first release on PyPI after the code is almost 10 years old.

The project originally started for English - Czech dictionary, but over the time support for more sources have been introduced and you can generate StarDict dictionaries from many other sources. So we now have German - Czech dictionary as well. There is also support for dicts.info which provides many bilingual dictionaries, unfortunately it's license doesn't allow to distribute them.

For quite some time, I maintain set of few scripts to generate dictionaries for StarDict. The generated dictionaries are quite popular, but the scripts become quite horrible over the time.

Now I finally found time to cleanup and refactoring, so that they share as much code as possible. As the duplication was quite massive, I was able to reduce code size to 60%, while adding new features and doing better error handling. Also now it should be pretty easy to add support for additional resources, so contributions are welcome :-).

The code can be found on GitHub.

I was just about to start writing own viewer for StarDict dictionaries for Harmattan, when I noticed that somebody already took the effort and the application is available. It's called DictionaryStar and it's developed on gitorious.

With the hard part done, I've adjusted packaging of various dictionaries I've made available for StarDict so that it works fine on Harmattan. For now only English-Czech one is completed, you hopefully be able to get it soon at Nokia store.

The reason I've started with only one is that this pretty much does not fit into content guidelines for Nokia store and I expect problems when this will be passing their QA. So I've decided to push only one for now and once I get it through, adding others will be easy.

While working on dictionaries for StarDict today, I've decided to finally bring them to openSUSE as well.

First step was to fix my favorite tool to access them - sdcv. The fixed package is now in my home project and will be hopefully soon accepted to Education project so that it is more visible (see request 69901 if it is already the case).

When I had the tool working, it was time to package dictionaries themselves. It was quite simple task and the rpms are available in my home project.

To install packages on openSUSE 11.4 simply do:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/Nijel:/stardict/openSUSE_11.4/ stardict
zypper ref
zypper in  stardict-czech  stardict-english-czech  stardict-german-czech

I've just changed scripts used to generate dictionaries for StarDict to avoid creating new tarballs when there is no real change in the data. This should avoid needless updates of the tarballs and automatically built packages when there is no real change in the data underneath.

If you somehow relied on fact that there is new tarball/package every day (or month for "stable" versions), this is no longer true and new ones will be generated only on changes.

I only hope I've tested everything properly and tarballs will really be generated on change :-).

Okay, I finally decided it's about time to make Debian package out of German-Czech dictionary for which I'm providing builds for StarDict.

Daily snapshots are (as usual) available in my Debian repository and the monthly builds will be uploaded to Debian (once it passes NEW queue).

The dictionary currently lists only few words, but I hope it will improve in near future.

Yesterday, stardict-czech got accepted to Debian. So there is yet another useful dictionary for Czech users available in Debian without need to use my repository (however daily builds are still available there).

The dictionary is built from ABZ.cz: slovník cizích slov using my set of scripts, which are also capable of converting other dictionaries.

Thanks to FTP masters team for accepting new package even in freeze, when they are busy with other things. Great work guys.