Hello, Based on comments raised in this thread and during yesterday's design meeting, I have made some changes: video at http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/global_dictionary_second_try.ogv In case of multiple selections, the words are no longer in the form of a set of hyperlinks, one can choose the dictionary from which the definition is to be retrieved and also the definition is made a bit more pleasing to the eye (with some really ugly hacks) :)
There were some more interesting ideas yesterday, especially Christian's ideas on providing machine-translation for sentences/phrases. However, I tried out Apertium, and somehow did not like the results. We can probably query Google's translation engine, but that would be a proprietary backend and also would require internet access. Some issues that need to be addressed: 1) Hyperlinking inside the definitions and providing a back button (for "See also:" kind of terms). This simply needs some more coding, and some ideas on where to put the back button. 2) Stemming. Some words (eg: hurried) are not in the dictionary. In such a case, do we perform some kind of stemming on the word ? This does make things more complicated, but it would let us provide more definitions. 3) Language detection. I stated in one of the previous mails in this thread that this would be difficult, but a friend of mine has been working in this area (http://smc.org.in/silpa/Guess_Language), and he has achieved some really good results already. If required, we can reuse his work. Thanks, Sayamindu On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 5:40 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayami...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > I was wondering about having a global "dictionary" key in sugar, just > like the view source key. When you select a word (or words), and press > that key, a window should pop up, showing the meaning of that word (or > those words). There can be a control panel entry to choose what > dictionary to use (eg: someone might want to have a English-Spanish > dictionary instead of a English-English one, etc). > I did a bit of hacking last weekend to come up with a rough mockup for > the feature. > There's a screencast at > http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/global_dictionary.ogv > (it works with all activities, and not just with Browse - and the > window pops up when I press the key) > Does it make sense for Sugar ? If it does, I think I can beat it into > shape over the next few weekends. > Thanks, > Sayamindu > > > -- > Sayamindu Dasgupta > [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] > -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel