Hi,

> I would strongly urge you to talk to existing printed dictionary 
> publishers and try to convince one of them to give or sell their 
> Linotype files to you.  There might be dictionaries that are out of 
> print or w/ expired copyrights.  It should not be too much work to write 
> a script to convert Linotype to Unicode - if such does not already  exist 

That's a great idea, anyone know anybody in the dictionary business with
words in digital format ?

> if it  fails to list sought words , you will need to create a dictionary 
> that has a minimum of 20,000 to 30,000 words before you can foist it on 

Well, I'd suggest starting on a more modest basis like 5000 commonly used
words.

> - we are looking at 100 man-years minimum.  That is 100 persons 
> dedicatedly working for a little under 2 hours *every* other day for a 
> whole year. Or 50 for 2 years. Or 1 for a 100 years
> 
> Now, do you guys have that kind of dedication/manpower/time?

Probably not just 3 or four people, but as a community effort it might be
a different story.

So an estimate for a web contributed dictionary would go
like this

20 hits (users) a day
2 words per user (user fills out translated word, perhaps meaning and
thats about it)
40 * 365 = 14,600 words/year , clearly impossible - or ?

You never know until you try...

> 
> For that kind of effort you are better of trying to adapt an OS OCR and 
> scanning in an old dictionary!

Another good suggestion, so how effcient is OCR now ?
anybody know.

-kaushik




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