LEXiTRON Mac Dictionary

This project transforms the LEXiTRON dictionary into a format usable by Mac's Dictionary.app. Thai-English, English-Thai, and bidirectional dictionaries are all generated. A copy of the original LEXiTRON data is included here, as well, since it is extremely difficult to obtain from NECTEC due to technical problems with their website.

Screenshots:

Thai-English:

English-Thai:

Three-finger/deep click integration:

Installing

You don't have to build the dictionaries yourself if you just want to install it and try it out. Just download the dictionary you want from the releases section on GitHub, and place it in your home folder in Library/Dictionaries. Then, in Dictionary.app go to Dictionary -> Preferences and check the box next to the name of the dictionary (e.g. LEXiTRON something). The dictionary should now be available for use.

Building

Required software:

• Mac OSX
• Perl (default one should be okay)
• thaicheck
• Dictionary Development Kit

First, LEXiTRON contains lots of illegal character combinations (probably typos). These will trip-up the dictionary compiler later, so they should be fixed using thaicheck. Note that these commands will print lots and lots of "errors"; these are just logging statements indicating the problems that are being fixed.

thaicheck -r lexitron-data/telex -f > build/telex.fixed
thaicheck -r lexitron-data/etlex -f > build/etlex.fixed

Next, convert the files to proper UTF-8-encoded XML. Note that there are several encoding problems in etlex; you can ignore the iso-8859-11 "\xFC" does not map to Unicode warnings.

perl scripts/fixformat.pl build/etlex.fixed > build/etlex.utf-8
perl scripts/fixformat.pl build/telex.fixed > build/telex.utf-8

Next, generate the source Mac dictionary XML files:

perl scripts/convert_to_mac.pl en-th build/etlex.utf-8 >build/LEXiTRON_en-th.xml
perl scripts/convert_to_mac.pl th-en build/telex.utf-8 >build/LEXiTRON_th-en.xml

Then use the dictionary development kit to generate the final dictionary file. First, set the DICT_BUILD_TOOL_DIR environment variable to the location of your copy of the Dictionary Development Kit. Then execute make to compile the final dictionaries:

export DICT_BUILD_TOOL_DIR='path/to/your/[Dictionary/Development/Kit](https://github.com/SebastianSzturo/Dictionary-Development-Kit.git)'
cd resources
make -f makefile_en-th all install
make -f makefile_th-en all install

Finally, in Dictionary.app go to Dictionary -> Preferences and check the box next to "LEXiTRON English/Thai". The dictionary should now be available for use.

If you would like the combined EN-TH/TH-EN dictionary, then do the following (after generating the source Mac XML dictionary files above):

perl scripts/combine.pl
export DICT_BUILD_TOOL_DIR='path/to/your/[Dictionary/Development/Kit](https://github.com/SebastianSzturo/Dictionary-Development-Kit.git)'
cd resources
make -f Makefile_combined all install

License

The lexitron-data folder is copyrighted by NECTEC and contains its own license files. The rest of the project is released under the MIT license (see LICENSE).

TODO

• NEXT: div's wrapping multiples should have a class name like 'entry'; should also wrap ALL entries, not just multiple ones
• add CSS
• script to make all dictionaries and zip up them for release
• I don't understand LEXiTRON sequence numbers; fly1 occurs several times in etlex
• sometimes doesn't show in Dictionary.app but still works from CLI ???
• One-step build
• Include Dictionary-Toolkit as sub-repo