GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 305094
Want results from multiple dict-servers
Last modified: 2021-06-10 11:22:23 UTC
Version details: 2.10.1 Distribution/Version: Ubuntu Breezy from 2005-05-22 14:00 I use gdict extensively while writing something with abiword and I would find it great if it could return results from multiple dict-servers, just as it is possible with web site searches.
hmm, it seems this is possible when choosing for example "All Dictionaries" instead of "Search all databases", so maybe I should just file a bug because if I choose "Search all databases" I only get a result from the first in the list. but still if it would be possible to mark dictionaries I want to search with checkboxes, this would be great (because for example All Dictionaries, seems only to be useful to find out if a word actually exists) If I have misunderstood the meaning of "Search all databases", please let me know and I can file a bug against gnome-utils/gdict
The situation is kinda unclear regarding the way searches work... We probe a server that returns a list of all the dictionaries it knows, so we actually have little control on what is shown in the dictionary list :-( It means the dictionaries shown can sometimes be unappropriate, or there's too many of them, or there's some you'd like to remove but you can't... (for example with the current default settings you get all kind of translations and synonyms and other stuff) I'm not sure what to do here - the possibility to set your own dictionaries is very important for gdict I think...
StarDict has you download dictionary files: http://stardict.sourceforge.net/Dictionaries_dictd-www.freedict.de.php onto your own PC. That way, you have much more control over their availibility and use. Also, I just made a dupe of this bug at #312281 . Sorry.
*** Bug 312281 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
the dictionary protocol mandates *two* meta-databases: ! (exclamation mark) means that "all of the databases will be searched until a match is found, and all matches in that database will be displayed"; * (star) means that "all of the matches in all available databases will be displayed" (from the RFC 2229). up until now, we always used ! instead of *. we could switch to the second, standard, meta-database. anyway, with the ability to create our own dictionary source, now we can set a specific database for a dictionary source; a better implementation would be allowing the user to create a local meta-database, which would resolve in a batch of queries, like (forgive the python-like syntax): meta_database = ('jargon', 'vera', 'wordnet') for db in meta_database: set_database(db) define_word(word) this would require: 1. the dictionary source definition file and GdictSource to support lists of strings inside the "Database" key; 2. the Defbox to set multiple databases instead of a single one, using a list or a vector of strings; 3. the Defbox to iterate through the list of databases using the same algorithm I've outlined above. this changes are not that hard (it could even be a gnome-love task, so I'll mark it that way), but would require a change inside libgdict, for which I think is a little bit late in the release cycle. I'll pin this down for the next release cycle.
> up until now, we always used ! instead of *. we could switch to the second, > standard, meta-database. I most probably was drunk when I wrote that. Dictionary uses * since I re-wrote it.
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