New custom English dictionaries

[Lyn2012]

My sister has just bought an Aura as her first ereader and is loving it other that finding the English dictionary to be somewhat lacking - I had lent her my Paperwhite and she much preferred this dictionary. Is it possible to somehow grab the PW dictionary, convert if necessary, and put onto the Aura? Or can anybody help with an already converted one?

Forgot to say, the Aura has already updated itself to the latest FW, 2.8.1.

[Warchild]

HI, I'm having an odd issue. I installed the Webster dictionary all with no problem. It works fine BUT somehow the install has mucked up the calibration of the Aura. When I long press a word I get the definition and the two handles for a word about 4 lines beneath the word I pressed!
I've rebooted, even did a pinhole rest. There's no other issues I can see except the long press consistently goes the 4 lines lower than what I intended!
Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

AH. I figured it out! I changed the line spacing and font size, that seemed to sort out the calibration.

[Kobohobo]

Originally Posted by byblo

Thank you, but I'm completely lost here

Any chance someone already converted this dictionary to the Kobo format? : http://abloz.com/huzheng/stardict-di...-2.4.2.tar.bz2 (XMLittre French dictionnary Le Littré)

Don't speak French myself, but here you go:

http://ge.tt/4f0wK9n/v/0

I had to upload it on a file hoster because of its size.

Here's a description of the dictionary for future readers:

This package contains an XML version of the French language dictionary written by Émile Littré and published in 1863, suitable for the stardict dictionary software.

Despite its age, this dictionary now fallen in the public domain is still a widely used reference source for French language and literature. It features 78,423 entries and 239,009 quotes from 3,910 authors.

Source: http://packages.debian.org/sid/text/stardict-xmlittre

__________________________________________

Originally Posted by PauloWerneck

I followed the intructions on how to install dictionaries in Kobo Glo but they did not work.

1. There were no dictionaries in .kobo/dict
[...]

Your dictionaries might not work because you didn't have any installed to start with. I am not an expert on this but maybe your custom dictionaries will work if you do the following:

1. Remove all remaining dictionaries under /.kobo/dict
2. Install as many dictionaries as you need from the Kobo settings menu and make sure they all work
3. Replace the default dictionaries with your custom ones
4. Refresh the dictionary index as described in the OP

__________________________________________

Originally Posted by Lyn2012

My sister has just bought an Aura as her first ereader and is loving it other that finding the English dictionary to be somewhat lacking - I had lent her my Paperwhite and she much preferred this dictionary. Is it possible to somehow grab the PW dictionary, convert if necessary, and put onto the Aura? Or can anybody help with an already converted one?

Forgot to say, the Aura has already updated itself to the latest FW, 2.8.1.

Kindle uses one of the Oxford dictionaries, as far as I know. Sharing these would be a problem due to copyright issues. But you should try one of the three free dictionaries in this thread out. WordNet especially should be just as good and up-to-date as any proprietary dictionary out there.

(If it has to be an Oxford dictionary there should be some way or another to find a stardict formatted one and convert it to the Kobo format. But you would have to do that on your own as it's not perfectly legal.)

[byblo]

Originally Posted by Kobohobo

Don't speak French myself, but here you go:
...

Thank you, it works well (the amount of quotes for a single definition is just amazing)

[PauloWerneck]

Thank you, Kobohobo, but I had no previous dictionary installed on Kobo and I just don't understand what I try to tell me with "2. Install as many dictionaries as you need from the Kobo settings menu and make sure they all work".

[PeterT]

I believe he is saying if you want to have 3 custom dictionaries, first install 3 from kobo.

[PauloWerneck]

Thank you, Peter

The problem was solved, anyway. I just installed a book and all dictionaries seem to start working properly.

I am quite satisfied with my Kobo, but it works erractically. I think that is because Kobo is more interested to sell ebooks than to make a proper working system to the ereader. I am converting some ebooks from collections of posts I have written for my blogs, but sometimes when I move one of them to Kobo, it works, next time, it doesn't. Thanks god Kobo is not a backup disk...

[Lyn2012]

Originally Posted by Kobohobo

Kindle uses one of the Oxford dictionaries, as far as I know. Sharing these would be a problem due to copyright issues. But you should try one of the three free dictionaries in this thread out. WordNet especially should be just as good and up-to-date as any proprietary dictionary out there.

(If it has to be an Oxford dictionary there should be some way or another to find a stardict formatted one and convert it to the Kobo format. But you would have to do that on your own as it's not perfectly legal.)

I now have the required dictionary in mobi format. I read somewhere on MR that it needs to be a zip file, so I left Calibre alone for 90 mins and it managed to convert the mobi to a zip, is this the same as the Kobo format you mention?

[tshering]

I don't know how you configured Calibre, but I think the answer is no, cf. this post.

[Geeky]

Hello,

I recently installed some custom dictionaries. First of all thanks to everybody involved in making it possible to do that.

Now I got two questions (sorry if these questions are answered already and I missed them):

Is there a way to prevent the firmware on overwriting the dictionaries upon syncing? At least that's the behaviour I encountered. Whenever the Kobo syncs, the custom dictionaries get replaced with the stock ones. Usually in a situation like this I'd go with a chattr or chflags command and set the files flag to immutable. Now I guess it won't be that easy on the Kobo. Anyone got a workaround for this problem?

Some dictionaries offer to edit the search term (i.e. the marked word/phrase), by taping the arrow in the upper left corner. Some don't allow this. Now obviously when I install custom dictionaries, I'd like to replace only "editable" ones. Or is there a way to change that behaviour, f.e. by editing the mysql database file?

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Geeky

Is there a way to prevent the firmware on overwriting the dictionaries upon syncing? At least that's the behaviour I encountered. Whenever the Kobo syncs, the custom dictionaries get replaced with the stock ones. Usually in a situation like this I'd go with a chattr or chflags command and set the files flag to immutable. Now I guess it won't be that easy on the Kobo. Anyone got a workaround for this problem?

I don't know how to prevent that the dictionaries get replaced, but this is how I deal with it.
I have a directory /mnt/onboard/customdict/ that contains my custom dictionaries, and this script

#!/bin/sh
DICTPATH="/mnt/onboard/.kobo/dict/"
CUSTOMDICTPATH="/mnt/onboard/customdict/"
for f in $CUSTOMDICTPATH*.zip; do
	if [ ! -e "$DICTPATH$(basename "$f")" ]; then
		cp "$f" "$DICTPATH"
	elif [ $(stat -c%s $f) -ne $(stat -c%s $DICTPATH$(basename "$f")) ]; then
		cp "$f" "$DICTPATH"
	fi
done

Previously, I used to start this script from rcS with every power circle. Since the introduction of kobo launcher, I use this application for starting it.

Originally Posted by Geeky

Some dictionaries offer to edit the search term (i.e. the marked word/phrase), by taping the arrow in the upper left corner. Some don't allow this. Now obviously when I install custom dictionaries, I'd like to replace only "editable" ones. Or is there a way to change that behaviour, f.e. by editing the mysql database file?

I don't know a solution for this.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Geeky

Some dictionaries offer to edit the search term (i.e. the marked word/phrase), by taping the arrow in the upper left corner. Some don't allow this. Now obviously when I install custom dictionaries, I'd like to replace only "editable" ones. Or is there a way to change that behaviour, f.e. by editing the mysql database file?

There probably isn't a solution. The problem is the license Kobo have for these dictionaries. Some, don't allow this use, so Kobo have had to block it. It sounds like the block is in code somewhere.

[tuxor]

Is there any way to declare synonyms in this dictionary format? Like, I want the entry describing "go" to be found as well when looking for "went".

[tshering]

Originally Posted by tuxor

Is there any way to declare synonyms in this dictionary format? Like, I want the entry describing "go" to be found as well when looking for "went".

The variant-tag comes close to what you are looking for, cf. this post. This does however not work in the case of "go" and "went", since the first two letters of the original expression and the variant must be identical (like go/goes/gone).
In the case of go and went, the only solution I can thin off is to copy the content of the go entry into the went entry.

[tuxor]

That's a pity, because it will definitely render it harder to convert StarDict dictionaries that contain a *.syn file. How is Penelope (http://code.google.com/p/penelope-dictionary-converter/) handling this?