Re: German Dictionary (fwd)
Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de> wrote:
>> Thanks for the hint. I'm interested in it and if noone objects
>> this could be taken as an "Intent to package" message.
> I looked at steak yesterday evening something closer and I have to
> say it is a useful tool.
I agree. It's especially great, that it is based on a dictionary which
is under GPL. At the moment I use a different dictionary which doesn't
have any copyright notice, to it is useless for Debian.
> Unfortunately I consider it to be technically bad designed. The
> source is shipped with a 3.4 MByte sized database. The installation
> process blows it up to 5.4 MByte by doubling the German words which
> are originally without umlauts (`"a' is spelled as `ae', `"s' ist
> spelled as `ss', ...).
Huh? I had a look at version 1.6 which comes with a database which
uses 8bit iso-8859-1 encoded umlauts. The installation process
converts these 8bit chars to 7bit (ä -> ae, ß -> ss,...).
I also don't think that this trivial conversion should be done at
installation (blowing up the database), but it should be done at
runtime.
> The translating work is done by a shell script by using several grep
> and sed commands. In my opinion this could be done with perl much
> better and faster.
grep is a very fast program, so perl may be a good alternative but it
shouldn't be a problem to keep using sed/awk/grep.
> By the way, there seems to be an error in the program and I could
> track down it, if you decide that I should do the packaging work in
> the way it is. But at first I would like to hear comments if
> somebody thinks we should enhance the program in the way I
> described.
I haven't the time to do this at the moment and I'm not completely
sure about the features I want/need. So I personally will use the
program as is for some time to find out which features are missing...
One feature I miss is the chance to add private words to a private
dictionary (somewhere in my home), when I search for a word, which
doesn't exist in the global dictionary. In this case I often consult
the Langenscheidts dictionary and when I find a word there, it isn't a
problem to add it to a private dictionary. It would be great to have a
way to provide those entries back to some person/server which
integrates them into the dictionary for later versions, but this is a
different question.
Another which is the way steak terminates. At the moment it sleeps for
30 minutes or is terminated by Ctrl-C. I would prefer to terminate it
by pressing enter and I additionally would prefer to use a pager for
viewing the entries (especially with long "Kontext" lists)...
Tschoeeee
Roland
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