Dictionary

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Prerequisites for using the plugin

To use the plugin, firstly you need to have the dictionary files which contain the words (index) and their description - dict.index and dict.desc, respectively - on /.rockbox/rocks/apps/ folder.

The dictionary files can be created by yourself (see "Creating a dictionary file" section, below), or you can get them crafted from the web (see "Sources for dictionary files" section).

Using the plugin

Now that you already have the two necessary files in place, you can launch the dict plugin (under Applications on the Browse plugins menu). The first thing you will see is the text input screen.

Type part of a word (or the whole word) or anything the dict files have a definition to and accept the text input. The plugin will search for matching entries on the dict.index file and display according description/meaning contained in the dict.desc file.

If no matches are found on the dictionary, a Not found. message will be displayed and the plugin will exit. You can do another search by relaunching the plugin.

Creating a dictionary file

1. Download the prolog version of the WordNet dictionary here: WNprolog-3.0.tar.gz

2. Extract wn_g.pl and wn_s.pl from it.

3. Put wn2rdf.pl, wn_g.pl, wn_s.pl and the rdf2binary tool in 1 directory, and execute wn2rdf.pl

4. Execute the rdf2binary tool, it will output dict.desc and dict.index

5. Copy dict.desc and dict.index to ./rockbox/rocks/apps on the player.

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Sources for dictionary files

There is nearly everything needed for a german<->english single word translator on http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de
They are providing the wordlist under the GNU GPL Version 2 (whatever it means to have versions for licenses. Thats totally new to me). See http://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/Local/urz/ding/de-en/ to download a 6 MB text file of words and words and words

For those who don't want to compile their own Dictionary files, you can download them from http://www.rockbox.dreamhosters.com/dict.zip (6.6MB) . If you want to download the two parts separately just get, http://www.rockbox.dreamhosters.com/dict.desc (17MB) and http://www.rockbox.dreamhosters.com/dict.index (5.0MB).

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The rockbox dictionary format

The input format for rdf2binary is very simple at this moment. It's one line per word, starting with the word, then a tab and then the description. The only thing you should be aware of when creating this files is that they must be in alphabetical order, and all words should be in lowercase.

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The binary format

The binary format used for the index is pretty simple, the struct is like this one:

struct {
    char word[WORDLEN];
    long offset;
};

WORDLEN is a define in the rdf2binary tool, and the plugin. And the offset is an offset in dict.desc where the description is stored.

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The improved binary format

This is still an idea under construction, but the new format would be just 1 file containing:

Field	Size	Description
magic number	4 bytes	A simple identifier to know if this is a valid file.
version	4 bytes	A format version number, this way we can detect old files and return an error.
max_wordlen	4 bytes	The maximum word lenght used in this file.
wordcount	4 bytes	The word count.

After that there should be the index data:

Field	Size	Description
offset	4 bytes	The offset from the beginning of the file to the description
word	max_wordlen	The word, lenght from the header.

And then just plain text description data, one description per line.

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The hash binary format

Header:

Field	Size	Description
magic number	4 bytes	A simple identifier to know if this is a valid file.
version	4 bytes	A format version number, this way we can detect old files and return an error.
wordcount	4 bytes	The word count.

Offset table:

Field	Size	Description
offset	4 bytes	The offset from the beginning of the file to a value in the hash table

Hash table:

Field	Size	Description
name	variable	The word
offset	4 bytes	The offset from the beginning of the file to the description

When searching for a word with hash X, the plugin looks up the offset for X and X+1 in the offset table. It reads the data between those offsets on looks for the word, we were searching for. It's just a hash table with chaining.

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CategoryPlugin: Dictionary plugin [Player, Recorder, Ondio, H100, H300, H10, iPod 1G2G, iPod 4G, iPod Color, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, iPod Video, iAudio M5, iAudio X5, Gigabeat, Sansa e200, Sansa c200, Sansa Fuze, MR-100]