Feature request: smart dictionary lookup for French

[holymadness]

I read mostly in French in Marvin and run across the following problem quite often.

Many articles ("the," "that," etc.) preceding French words that begin with vowels are apostrophized, as such:

The plane = L'avion
That he said = Qu'il a dit

And so on.

When you highlight one of these words with an apostrophized article in front of it, the word and the article are both highlighted. However, Apple's built-in dictionary doesn't recognize these words if the article precedes them. So you can define écurie but not l'écurie. That means I have to manually readjust the sliders on these words when I look them up to exclude the article and the apostrophe. It's a bit annoying and takes time.

Would it be possible for Marvin to recognize whether a book is in French by looking at the metadata, and for words looked up the dictionary, have the app ignore the apostrophe and everything in front of it? This is something that dedicated French dictionary apps, such as Antidote, have managed to implement (though not with the default system dictionary).

[kguil]

I'm not familiar with that app but it may be that the app itself filters out the article and not the selection.

Marvin can and does detect the language of a book (if it's in the metadata). What I can do is this:

- Do not modify the selection (i.e. allow the selection of the article as well, iOS is gets upset when you try and play around with selections).
- When you launch the dictionary, Marvin will strip out the article** if the language is French.
- Send the sanitised version of the selection to the dictionary.

** I'd hard-code a set of prefixes that Marvin would strip out.

Questions:

1) Does this sound robust?
2) Would you be willing to help and send me a list of prefixes to strip out? My French is rusty.

[holymadness]

Hi Kris,

Thanks for this very encouraging response. Your proposed implementation sounds like the best one: the app shouldn't fiddle with the selection, it should just intelligently parse the word when being looked up in the dictionary. Hard-coding the prefixes is also a great choice because it will prevent errors when looking up the occasional word that has an apostrophe in it, like aujourd'hui.

I'll send you a complete list of prefixes once I've done some testing on the built-in dictionary. Oddly, iOS 8 seems to have broken my default dictionaries and I can't look up any words or download/delete dictionaries anymore.

[holymadness]

After a quick system restore, my dictionaries are back up and running. Here is the complete list of prefixes that prevent dictionary lookup:

C'
D'
J'
L'
M'
N'
QU'
S'
T'

[kguil]

@holymadness - fantastic. I'll get right on it (I really like this, might be able to fit it in one of the next updates).

[holymadness]

Great news! Marvin keeps getting better and better.

Let me know if you want me to email you a French book for testing.

[kguil]

@holymadness: I'll definitely get in touch with you once I have this working.

I'm afraid that I'll have to postpone this (and the Dropbox improvements I promised earlier) by an update. Due to some unexpected problems on iOS 8 and the time it's taking Apple to review updates, I'm focusing the next one to squash some nasty bugs and bring iPhone 6/6+ compatibility to everyone. I promise this will come next.

[holymadness]

No problem, take your time.

[holymadness]

Hello, I was wondering if you had any updates regarding this feature request. Thank you.