Dictionary as Epub

[FrankJH]

Dear All,

so far, my Google researches concerning this subject haven't been successful, so I took the liberty to ask a question here.

I'd like to create my own dictionaries.

I developped some Java-routines which are able to download specific sections from the English and French Wiktionary, process them and are able to output them in HTML.

Using CSS-Stylesheets, one can achieve a very good readability, but there's one problem.

I made a test with approximately 6000 entries ... these entries are linked via the table of contents to the explanations - this mean: a lot of href's.

It turned out to very slow ... anyway, it is also slow if I open my self-compiled dictionary page in a browser.

Obviously, using href's is not the best way to handle this ...

Has anyone of you experiences with a dictionary as an epub?

I guess one has to use a database ... but is this possible within an epub?

I think we have to use Javascript for these purposes ... but maybe I'm wrong ...

I'd also like to implement an index search ... this means: I use an input prompt, while typing the search term, proposals/term completions will be shown, e.g. if I type in the search term "for", proposals like "for", "forbidden", "foresake" will be shown.

If anybody has solved this problem, it would be very nice if he (or she) would share these experiences with me.

Best wishes, and thank you in advance, Frank

P.S. Please feel free to tell me that my ideas are wrong or if something of this kind won't work ...

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by FrankJH

I guess one has to use a database ... but is this possible within an epub?
I think we have to use Javascript for these purposes ... but maybe I'm wrong

I experimented with this some time ago and found out that it's theoretically possible to embed a sqlite database in an epub and query it using a sqlite JavaScript library.
If you open my proof-of-concept epub3 file with Calibre Editor or Apple Books you should get single-word German definitions, if you click on book, house or mouse in the second paragraph.
However, if you look at the source files, you'll notice that the size of the 6 word demo database is already 164KB, which makes this approach impractical.

BTW, there's an IDPF dictionary proposal that nobody seems to be interested in.

You might want to look into creating Stardict dictionaries. They're supported by many Android epub apps and KOReader.

You could also simply convert your epubs to Kindle books and read them with one of the free Kindle apps, which come with excellent free dictionaries.

(You could also convert HTML source files (with custom markup) to Kindle dictionaries with KindleGen.)

[FrankJH]

Hello Doitsu, thanks a lot for answering!

I see: I have to experiment a little ...

Kind regards, Frank

[Sarmat89]

That's just another example of inadequacy of EPUB "standard" for real-life applications.

[KevinH]

Given their size and need for direct or indexed access, dictionaries should really be provided as a system level service or networked resource and not as an epub (IMHO), and this really has nothing to do with the epub standard and more to do with inadequate or non-expandable e-reading devices.