New custom English dictionaries

[tkavan]

This is sort of off topic, and everyone may know it. I read my Kobo books both on my Kobo Glo, and with the Kobo app on my Samsung Galaxy tablet. On the Glo, long-pressing a word brings up the dictionary definition. On the tablet it brings up the definition, plus links to check out the word on Wikipedia or on Google. That's a very useful feature, since it allows you to check historical or other facts as well as just simple definitions.

On topic: I use a Websters dictionary on my Glo, and after every sync have to transfer it anew. It would be nice if Kobo would allow you in "settings" to set a default dictionary.

[tuxor]

I answer my own question about how penelope handles it: It doesn't even try to save some space by using the variant tag in cases where that's possible. Instead it just has a new word-definition-pair for each synonym, so that some definitions simply appear several times - this will blow up the dictionary significantly in certain cases (see penelope3.py, lines 1130-1132 and 1180-1197).

A really unfortunate dictionary format :-/

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by tkavan

This is sort of off topic, and everyone may know it. I read my Kobo books both on my Kobo Glo, and with the Kobo app on my Samsung Galaxy tablet. On the Glo, long-pressing a word brings up the dictionary definition. On the tablet it brings up the definition, plus links to check out the word on Wikipedia or on Google. That's a very useful feature, since it allows you to check historical or other facts as well as just simple definitions.

On topic: I use a Websters dictionary on my Glo, and after every sync have to transfer it anew. It would be nice if Kobo would allow you in "settings" to set a default dictionary.

If I remember correctly there is a hidden option (is not in the GUI) that will let you enable Google on the Glo

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by PeterT

If I remember correctly there is a hidden option (is not in the GUI) that will let you enable Google on the Glo

See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=218376

[drdrex]

So, I wanted to make my own dictionaries as well and wanted to share my process with the rest of you:

http://wrttn.in/820037

Have fun!

Originally Posted by drdrex

So, I wanted to make my own dictionaries as well and wanted to share my process with the rest of you:

http://wrttn.in/820037

Have fun!

Hi, drdrex, first of thanks for the guide

But I have a nood question, at the end of the creation process I obtained ywo files: dict and and dict.idx
Then? I'll made the zip file?

[RobertJSawyer]

Has anyone been able to get the Webster's 1913 dictionary to work as a if it were a secondary language dictionary on any E Ink Kobo device? I've had no trouble installing the WordNet dictionary as if it were the Nederlands dictionary (by renaming it to dicthtml-nl.zip), but no matter what language I try to rename the Webster's 1913 dictionary to on my Mini, Glo, Aura, or Aura HD, I get a message saying there's no dictionary installed. Thanks!

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

Has anyone been able to get the Webster's 1913 dictionary to work as a if it were a secondary language dictionary on any E Ink Kobo device? I've had no trouble installing the WordNet dictionary as if it were the Nederlands dictionary (by renaming it to dicthtml-nl.zip), but no matter what language I try to rename the Webster's 1913 dictionary to on my Mini, Glo, Aura, or Aura HD, I get a message saying there's no dictionary installed. Thanks!

I have it on both my Glo and AuraHD, renamed as dicthtml-pt.zip i.e. the Portuguese dictionary. It seems to work OK.

FWIW, I don't sync to Kobo Desktop very often, but I have noticed that my custom dictionaries don't always survive a sync and get replaced with the official versions. Simply recopying the custom one back seems to fix it, though.

Edit: FYI, the filesize is 11,635,543 bytes, just in case we're not talking about the same version.

[forster01]

I have a free dictionary made for kindle(prc), and i want to convert it to kobo. Can someone please help me with this one?

[gong]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

Has anyone been able to get the Webster's 1913 dictionary to work as a if it were a secondary language dictionary on any E Ink Kobo device? I've had no trouble installing the WordNet dictionary as if it were the Nederlands dictionary (by renaming it to dicthtml-nl.zip), but no matter what language I try to rename the Webster's 1913 dictionary to on my Mini, Glo, Aura, or Aura HD, I get a message saying there's no dictionary installed. Thanks!

Hello, I don't know if it can help but I had problems too before I found out there was a zip inside the zip.

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by gong

Hello, I don't know if it can help but I had problems too before I found out there was a zip inside the zip.

That's right. I did it that way to give a meaningful name to the .zip attached to the first post. So you need to unzip Websters1913.zip and copy the resulting dicthtml.zip to the Kobo. Full instructions are in my first post.

[RobertJSawyer]

Originally Posted by gong

Hello, I don't know if it can help but I had problems too before I found out there was a zip inside the zip.

D'oh! Thank you! Yes, that was my problem: I hadn't realized that we had to unzip the zip file for this particular dictionary.

All best wishes!

[RobertJSawyer]

I've tried two tricks to keep my Kobo units from overwriting the custom dictionaries with the default versions (I have Wordnet installed as Deutsch and Webster's 1913 as Nederlands), but neither worked: I tried setting the files to read-only attributes, and I tried giving them file dates in the future (2014) so that the Kobo might think that these were more recent than the ones it would otherwise replace them with. But nothing seems to stop the damn overwriting of the custom dictionaries.

[davidfor]

The device database has a "Dictionary" table. This has columns "Size" and "LastModified". Have you tried setting these? "Size" is the file size of the dictionary and "LastModified" is a timestamp. I would set this to either the same as the file timestamp, or somewhere in the future.

[RobertJSawyer]

Davidfor, I've never played around with modifying the database. But I hope someone more knowledgeable of such things will give your suggestion a try! I'd love to have this problem solved.