Hey guys, so for the past week or so I've been creating a standalone rikaichan style context based lookup app. The main reason I've started work on this was because I do quite a bit of reading on my computer, and rikaichan is limited by having to run in firefox. Because I'm just using a browser window I have less control over formatting, firefox gets laggy with large text files, and it doesn't have bookmarks within the page. Importantly, there is no integration with Anki. I can't quickly check to see if a something is already in my deck, nor can I add stuff to a deck with a single click.

Although I still probably have a week or two left before I'm comfortable releasing this to the public I already have most of the core stuff working. I ported what I thought was important from rikaichan to python, and got a basic start on the UI. It's also being developed to support multiple languages, but will probably only have support for Japanese for a while since that's all I'm learning now.


The definition window is dockable, if you look hard enough you can see some underlined text in the window. That shows what's being defined. It follows the cursor (which you can't see in the screenshot), like rikaichan.


Ooh, it snaps off and floats too, weee.

What do you guys think? Some questions:

1) Is this better as a plugin or standalone app? Both?
2) What features would you like to have that are absent from rikaichan?
3) What should this app be called? Help me think up a good name

I'm going to move this from my personal subversion repository to a Google Code as soon as I get a good name for this project. Anyway, time to get some sleep, I'd love to hear you guys' thoughts

Edit: Oh the UI will look decent. It's kind of hideous right now, I just got it running hehe.

Is that like on a text document? -clueless-

Yup, it's a text document. Meant for reading books mostly.

FooSoft Wrote:Yup, it's a text document. Meant for reading books mostly.

Kay, think I'm going to marry you now then. =D (Joking).

OMG THIS WILL BE AWESOME. I keep most of my vocab notes in text documents when I find them to input later into Anki, and this will save me having to paste them into Firefox for Rikai chan. ;;

THANK YOOOOU and I cannot wait for this to come out.

nohika Wrote:Is that like on a text document? -clueless-

clueless would be a good name for it, cos you're clueless when before you look up the word!

This looks like it would definitely be handy as an alternative to rikaichan in terms of reading things like books.

Definitely having the feature to check if a word is already in ur deck or not would be sweet and 1-click adds would rock pretty hard too.

A version for french would just be the best. Haha. But seriously this looks good.

FooSoft Wrote:I ported what I thought was important from rikaichan to python, and got a basic start on the UI.

are you doing anything windows specific? it'd be great if it worked under unix/X11 too!

Haha, no way am I doing anything Windows specific, I'm actually developing this on Linux

FooSoft Wrote:Haha, no way am I doing anything Windows specific, I'm actually developing this on Linux

excellent! how about having it work with the current selection in any app?

I'm sure it would be possible to get it with selection within any app, but at that point you start getting into nasty platform specific business, so it's not worth it (at least for me, since it wouldn't make my life any simpler ).

would it be possible to add your own/multiple dictionaries and/or replace dictionaries in it like you can with goldendict and stardict? Or are you pretty much stuck with edict? Either way, this will be another excellent addition to my toolkit. BTW, will this work in any text editor/reader or just a specific one, and how does it work with various document types (ie. .doc, .rtf, .pdf, open office doc, html, etc.) ?

Right now it uses the rikaichan edict dictionary database. I definitely want to support multiple dictionaries, but this won't be in the first release. If someone could provide a list of dictionaries that support is desired for I can code stuff around it.

Word definitions will only work within the context of the application. Basically think of it as a dedicated reader application. Eventually I want to add vertical text support, but this will probably require a custom text renderer as basically no UI framework supports this correctly.

Support for loading HTML files is a pretty strong possibility, as this is quite easy to do in QT (probably again not in the first release though). So probably text and HTML, and everything else will just have to get converted to one of these formats. I feel like supporting too many formats would be going outside of the scope of the application.

This looks pretty cool.
It would be nice if there's a way to add epwing support. 大辞林は最高！

astendra Wrote:This looks pretty cool.
It would be nice if there's a way to add epwing support. 大辞林は最高！

I would also love to have a rikaichan-like standalone app with epwing support. (Meikyo + Daijisen FTW XD)

FooSoft Wrote:I'm sure it would be possible to get it with selection within any app, but at that point you start getting into nasty platform specific business, so it's not worth it (at least for me, since it wouldn't make my life any simpler ).

well, I wouldn't complain if selection lookup only worked in X...

what are you using for the UI?

FooSoft Wrote:Right now it uses the rikaichan edict dictionary database. I definitely want to support multiple dictionaries, but this won't be in the first release. If someone could provide a list of dictionaries that support is desired for I can code stuff around it.

just epwing should do it!

cangy Wrote:well, I wouldn't complain if selection lookup only worked in X...

Neither would I, but a lot of people would. It would also be a shame to have platform specific components in an otherwise portable app.

cangy Wrote:what are you using for the UI?

I'm using Qt. Or more specifically PyQt since I'm writing this in python. This works out really well since Anki is also PyQt, so they can play nice together.

FooSoft Wrote:Neither would I, but a lot of people would. It would also be a shame to have platform specific components in an otherwise portable app.

I'm using Qt. Or more specifically PyQt since I'm writing this in python. This works out really well since Anki is also PyQt, so they can play nice together.

I know as little Qt as I can get away with, but it looks like QClipboard will give you the clipboard cross platform, which would be a nice feature. It probably won't give the X selection though unless it's copied to the clipboard, but given other platforms don't have a selection anyway, it wouldn't matter if there was X-only code for that!

FooSoft Wrote:Importantly, there is no integration with Anki. I can't quickly check to see if a something is already in my deck, nor can I add stuff to a deck with a single click.

1) Is this better as a plugin or standalone app? Both?

anki deck lookup would be great, though you probably need to index all the decks yourself. writing it to run as a plugin and standalone sounds like a good aim

for EPWING, see this if you haven't already: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid109742

Yay, starting to look more like a real app





The image buttons in the sidebar are for adding definitions to deck or copying the given term to the clipboard rikai-chan style.

Nice work, FooSoft!
You might want to take a look at a similar rikaichan-style program (using the wadoku database) which works in every application:

http://www.boscowitch.de/projects/wadoku-notify

I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble but you can drag and drop plain text files onto an empty tab in Firefox (or go to 'open with' and select firefox) and use Rikai-chan as you normally would. I would suggest getting a Firefox plugin that facilitates word wrap though, otherwise the text goes on forever.

No bubbles burst here, that's what I've been doing before. It's not convenient and I want anki integration dammit!

firion1234 Wrote:I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble but you can drag and drop plain text files onto an empty tab in Firefox (or go to 'open with' and select firefox) and use Rikai-chan as you normally would. I would suggest getting a Firefox plugin that facilitates word wrap though, otherwise the text goes on forever.

You just destroyed my entire conception of reality.

You are my personal hero.

I've been fighting with the OnlineLookup plugin for Anki, and trying to get it to pull from dictionary.app in OSX (same core dictionaries) to speed lookup enough to make my dream of automatically generated cards a reality, but what you're suggesting blows that away.

1) Is this better as a plugin or standalone app? Both?
Standalone app with Anki integration. I'm assuming that you mean having it as a plugin for Firefox, and while that's cool and all, it would totally suck for those of us that don't use it. That said, by having it as a Firefox plugin, distribution would be a whole heck of a lot easier. I vote for whatever gets it into my hands fastest.

2) What features would you like to have that are absent from rikaichan?
Anki card generation and duplicate card checking, for sure; Kokugo (J->J) dictionary support; .PDF compatibility for E-books; and an option to make contextual cards, instead of just Definition -> Word or Hiragana -> Kanji + Definition, e.g.:

Front: ４年前、東京ドーム約３１個分という[...]な敷地に家族５人で移り住んできた。

Back: ４年前、東京ドーム約３１個分という広大な敷地に家族５人で移り住んできた。

こうだい【広大】
広大な平原｜[a vast / an extensive] plain
広大無辺な｜(vast and) boundless

So, I guess that would be "select word and have it build a card with the entire sentence". That would be shit-hot.

3) What should this app be called? Help me think up a good name.
Erm... Tadokun? Honestly, I think that "Clueless" is pretty good, although it doesn't really carry any Japanese connotations.


Please keep this project going! I know a ton of people that would love to get their hands on this once it's finished.

@FeloniousMonk

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7074

you are amazing