Epub Revision - Dictionaries!!

[Nate the great]

No native support for book-specific semantics. For academic publishing in particular, the absence of native support for book-specific structures such as glossaries, note reference systems and advanced cross-reference systems pose a limitation that negatively impacts the behavioral repertoire of reading systems.

Dictionaries!!

[HarryT]

I was under the impression that you had already submitted a proposal for ePub dictionaries, a year or so ago? What happened to that?

[Angst]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Dictionaries!!

ditto.

I also want to be able to highlight any word on the the page and view the dictionary. 1-3 lines at the bottom of the page for the word definition would be nice.

I would also like a dictionary standard so I can provide/choose my own preferred dictionary provided it meets the standard.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Angst

I would also like a dictionary standard so I can provide/choose my own preferred dictionary provided it meets the standard.

That's what this is about. The rest would fall in the interface field, and I don't think the specification wants to deal too much with interfaces.

[mike_bike_kite]

Could you have additions to the standard dictionary that are specific to, and held in, the current book. This could be used for a quick reminder of who each character is in your current book ie clicking on Desdemona might produce:

Desdemona : a Venetian beauty who enrages and disappoints her father, a Venetian senator, when she elopes with Othello, a man several years her senior and not of her race.

This could be quite a neat feature for those who read a few books at a time and are forced to remember huge casts of characters. It would also be quite useful to simple folk like myself who can only just remember the name of the central character.

Mike

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

Could you have additions to the standard dictionary that are specific to, and held in, the current book.

A book-level glosssary that integrates with the main dictionary/dictionaries would be wonderful. I'd find it very useful for use with older books, where some words are archaic. At the moment I handle them with footnotes, (links) which isn't ideal.

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

Could you have additions to the standard dictionary that are specific to, and held in, the current book.

Obviously you'd also want to have the ability to have images as well so you could have maps of places or images of people or things. Providing a dictionary should be straightforward but expanding the idea just a little bit might allow you to step ahead in the race without a great deal of effort.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I was under the impression that you had already submitted a proposal for ePub dictionaries, a year or so ago? What happened to that?

Nate? What happened to the earlier dictionary proposal?

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Nate? What happened to the earlier dictionary proposal?

It fell apart because not enough people were interested in developing it.

BTW, did you notice that a couple months later, Sony announced that their new e-readers would use the dictionary option provided by Adobe Reader Mobile? I think they responded to MR.

[HarryT]

Good news if that was the case!