Mobi dictionary lookup

[1mikemoroz]

I would like to know how to add the word look-up feature to a dictionary in the mobi format for the Kindle3, just like that feature for the built in dictionary.
I understand with calibre you make a table of contents page and link to the word pages for a table of contents, but being able to just type a word in the search box that comes up with the built in dictionary and having the list of words come up as you type is much more convenient. Are there any Tutorials for this?

[Doitsu]

AFAIK, you'll need to use the free Mobipocket Creator for this, which has several special options for dictionary creation. If you're interested in one of the FIGS languages, a timesaving option would be to deflate the old MS Reader dictionaries and re-compile with Mobipocket Creator. (This will require some minor edits to the main dictionary source .html file.)

[janvanmaar]

One way to do it starting from a MOBI (book format) file is this:

1. explode the MOBI to HTML - eg by Calibre or mobi2html
2. look at the HTML file structure and write a script that turns it into a tab delimited file suitable for input to tab2opf.py
3. use tab2opf.py script to convert the tab delimited file to OPF+HTML(s) (with a different structure than the original HTML)
4. edit OPF file in an editor - metadata definition
5. write a script to add the inflections to the HTML file, the syntax is here:
http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/sh...ad.php?t=59724
(the most complicated step if you want to catch vast majority of the inflected forms - plurals, diminutives, past tenses etc, different for every language)
6. use mobigen.exe to convert the prepared OPF+HTML to MOBI

By no means I claim this is the best, optimal or easiest solution - it is just what I did in order to use a Dutch-English dictionary with Kindle3. The existing scripts I mentioned above should be quite easy to find, download and use - clearly, except of points 2 and 5 where I have written my own scripts.

Note that you can probably skip the most complicated step 5 for the purpose you describe because the inflected forms are not caught by the typed search in the dictionary anyway. I included it only for the sake of completeness - if one wanted a way to convert a dictionary from a mobi book format into a "full" dictionary supporting complete instant lookup in books being read on the Kindle.

[homitzky]

@janvanmaar
Can you share point 5 script with us? I found only a wordlist with inflected forms - http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/projec...204/agid-4.zip, but it is not much helpful without your script... Thanks in advance.

[janvanmaar]

My script would be rather useless in your situation as majority of the script was generation of the inflections themselves (using various grammatical rules and lists of irregular forms - I assume that is what make-infl script from your link does too) and then modification the html's on the fly. Besides that, it was just a quick hack, so you would hardly be able to reuse the code.

In your situation, since you already have the inflections (infl.txt), all you need to do is to feed them to your html files. Your html files from point 3 already contain the following tag for each entry:

<idx:orth>word</idx:orth>

All you need is to modify it to this:

<idx:orth>word
  <idx:infl inflgrp="group1"> 
    <idx:iform name="infl1" value="wordform1" /> 
    <idx:iform name="infl2" value="wordform2" /> 
    ...
    <idx:iform name="infl3" value="wordformN" />
  </idx:infl>
</idx:orth>

(for each "word V/M: wordform1 | wordform2 | ... | wordformN" line from your infl.txt file)

[homitzky]

Sure, you must be right, but I'm not a programmer so any script that adds inflections to a dictionary is valuable and desirable in my case.

[janvanmaar]

Ok but you have been warned
I send it to your PM.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by janvanmaar

By no means I claim this is the best, optimal or easiest solution - it is just what I did in order to use a Dutch-English dictionary with Kindle3.

Did you find a free Dutch-English dictionary or did you add the inflections to a commercial dictionary such as the van Dale?
If it's a non-commercial dictionary, could you share it?

[janvanmaar]

It was Van Dale, so I cannot share the dictionary, sorry...
Unfortunately, I am not aware of a good free Dutch-English dictionary. All I could do is to provide you with the scripts I used, so you could try to rebuild the Van Dale (or other) dictionary if you buy one. As I mentioned, my scripts were just "quick hacks" although homitzky has reported success in using them for EN-PL dictionary.