Eloquent Software

Robert Whittier · Guest

Just heard about this in MacGems on the Macworld webpage, so I downloaded to give it a whirl. I teach scientific writing to medical science graduate students at the University of Tokyo, and this utility really seems to hold promise for making it easier for the students to read the medical journals, most of which are available to them online. The edict dictionary that one can automatically download does not contain sufficient technical terms, but there is such a dictionary put together by the Live Science Dictionary Projecthttp://lsd.pharm.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/index.html. Although the most recent version is not available in a compatible format, a 1997 versionhttp://www.vector.co.jp/download/file/data/writing/ff041746.html purports to be in edict format, so it should work automatically with the cedict adaptor.

My problem is that when I try to install the extracted edict file in LiveDictionary, I get the following error message:

mikeash · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 7:09 pm Post subject:

The CEDICT Adapter is rather picky about what files it will accept (probably too picky), so the chances of external dictionaries working with it are slim. However, I will investigate this dictionary and see about adding support for it, and see about making the adapter looser about what it accepts in general. Look for an update to the adapter in a couple of weeks.

mikeash · Posted: Tue May 03, 2005 7:16 pm Post subject:

It's not a more accepting CEDICT Adapter, but it's almost as good. We've posted a converter program that should allow you to use these dictionaries with LiveDictionary's Freedict adapter. See this post for details:

http://forums.eloquentsw.com/viewtopic.php?p=165

Robert Whittier · Guest

Sorry, I've been a bit preoccupied with other matters, and I just discovered that you had posted the fix.

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you! The converter program worked flawlessly, and I now have ediclsd3 installed and working in LiveDictionary. And if you keep track of this sort of thing, you'll see that I am now an official registered user. Now to introduce it to my class. And maybe Ringo too (the predominantly English-speaking Tokyo Mac Users Group).

I can't wait until you make this program into a service that will work with any text-parsing program. But now that Safari reads pdf's, converting it to a service may not quite be quite so urgent as it was before, from my humble perspective, at least.

Robert Whittier · Guest

Oops, I was a bit hasty in leaping to conclusions. Safari may now read pdf's, but LiveDictionary doesn't seem to function when viewing a pdf. If making LiveDictionary available as a service would solve the problem, that would be a really welcome development!

mikeash · Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 11:58 am Post subject:

What LiveDictionary works with and what it doesn't work with is more a function of the kind of view or control that you're using, rather than the program you're using. For example, it's fairly easy to make LiveDictionary load into other Cocoa apps, as detailed elsewhere on this forum, (and something we still plan to make official one of these days) but it doesn't work in every app because LiveDictionary doesn't always understand the views and controls in question. As it stands now, LiveDictionary can support a WebView, a standard Cocoa text view, and various Cocoa controls such as text boxes and buttons. Safari's PDF view is not supported at the moment. However, your post got me thinking about it, and it doesn't look too difficult to add, so look for this in an upcoming release. Thanks for the suggestion.