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Pop-up dictionary suggestions/solutions? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5767 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 1 of 12 09 September 2010 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm looking for an Italian pop-up dictionary, ideally that can deal with inflected forms of words, and that I can activate with a mouse click or hovering over a word (not typing the word out manually). I'm more or less content with Google Translate's pop-up function, but you can only use it inside of a web browser, which renders it useless for PDF's and .doc files. If anyone has any recommendations (or offline GT solutions) I'd love to hear about them, as well as any particularly good pop-up dictionaries for other languages.
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| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5079 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 2 of 12 09 September 2010 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||
In such a case you can use your word processing application for converting these types to html documents. For .doc it is just a matter of "Save as ..." and choose html, website or similar, and for .pdf you can open the original document with your pdf reader, press "Strg + A", then Strg + C", go to your word processor, "Strg + V" there and save as .htm(l) again. (Sorry if you are very familiar with the process of copying and inserting, just do what you use to do.) This way one can use all the language oriented plug-in stuff in Firefox, what is very convenient, indeed. Edited by lingoleng on 09 September 2010 at 8:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6884 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 3 of 12 09 September 2010 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been using "lingoes" which is free and comes with a number of dictionaries. I've also used Bablyon which is excellent software-wise (not so great company-wise as I've ended up with an "expired" licence and an unusable paid-for copy). I also have Ultralingua French dictionary - there are no doubt others**.
Lingoes is free but weaker because it doesn't have the sample sentences that Ultralingua has - to be fair Babylon's free dictionaries don't either IIRC. It does do pop-up - I have mine configured with Alt + Right-click - and is meant to have a PDF plugin but I can't get the install to work. However, it does have clipboard monitoring so if you've got that turned on a quick Ctrl+c of a highlighted word will popup the dictionary. Ultralingua does work in PDF and Word but not with Notepad or Wordpad - at least not on Windows 7. I'm not sure about Babylon but this (Notepad/Wordpad) appears to be a common problem with this type of software. This isn't a biggie as I use PSPAD to open text documents anyway. Incidentally they all seem to work in both IE and Firefox for the Web. HTH. Edit ** - By that I meant there are other products not other Ultralingua dictionaries (which there obviously are). Edited by Andy E on 09 September 2010 at 9:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5767 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 4 of 12 09 September 2010 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lingoleng:
And there you have it; I'd been trying for a long time to find a solution on the browser side, it never occurred to me to change formats in Word. Question: do you know of a way to go in the opposite direction? I have some html documents I want to view offline. There's some special formatting, however, which gets screwed up when I open them in Word. Thanks for the conversion tip in Word. Edited by carlonove on 09 September 2010 at 9:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5079 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 5 of 12 09 September 2010 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | ||
You're welcome. From html to doc or pdf works, too, but it is true, that special formatting can get lost on the way. If you have a specific problem, you can pm me and I can have a look if I can work around it, but this will not always work, I guess. One possible solution is the installation of a system wide pdf printer. As you use Windows this means just the installation of an additional driver, it is just software, of course. If installation succeeds you can use the print function in any application, print to pdf, and this is equivalent to saving as pdf, really a fine thing. Open Office is another solution, you can install it in addition to Word, and it should have pdf functionality included, I am not up to date about Windows, but it is certainly worth a try, it is a really good office suite and should do no harm on your computer. Open Writer handles html very well, but the conversion process can of course still mean a loss of formatting information. If you want to use Open Office, you have to save the web page in your browser (as html, single page, or similar) and then open it in Writer to do the conversion there. Depending on one's familiarity with this stuff what I just have written may sound either trivial or very complicated, so feel free to ask any questions or pm me if necessary. Edited by lingoleng on 09 September 2010 at 10:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5647 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 6 of 12 10 September 2010 at 4:27am | IP Logged | ||
If you install the AutoCopy plug-in for FireFox, double-clicking or other highlighting will automatically copy to the clipboard, so Ctrl+c is not required. Just double-click or highlight. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6884 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 7 of 12 10 September 2010 at 7:26am | IP Logged | ||
You misunderstood me... as I noted in the last line of my post, lingoes + Ultralingua (and Babylon for that matter) work fine in both Firefox and IE with a configured hotkey + mouse combination e.g. Alt + Right-click or Ctrl + Right-click. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5101 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 8 of 12 10 September 2010 at 10:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Another free popup dictionary is StarDict. It works in pretty much any Windows application, including PDF readers and word processors, but the free dictionaries that are available for it are often hit-and-miss. However, you can create your own custom dictionaries from tab delimited files or Babylon .bgl files with the free StarDict editor, which needs to be copied to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\bin folder to work. Please note that you cannot install StarDict if you've already installed GIMP, because StarDict uses an older GTK library.
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