Babbletower - Motivation

Motivation

Babbletower is certainly not the first dictionary reader project, but a few words about its history should explain why yet another dictionary reader. Things started when some while back I discovered Wadoku-Jiten, an excellent Japanese-German dictionary, compiled and published by Ulrich Apel. The wish to use this dictionary on a PDA, along with dictionaries from the Monash site I was already using came up very quickly.

Looking around I could find quite a few dictionary readers. However, evaluating them showed quickly that all of them had shortcomings I wasn't willing to accept. The most important ones among them:

The reader was meant for a particular dictionary file, and depended on that file's format.
If multiple dictionaries could be used, switching between them was cumbersome, or they could not easily be searched simultaneously.
The reader had problems with character encodings.
The dictionary I mentioned above contains Japanese characters, along with German Umlaute. This usually led to a situation where the Umlaute turn into Japanese characters, which can be quite dizzying in the middle of a German word, and is in the era of Unicode not really acceptable. Transcoding the Umlaute in the original dictionary file was one solution. The results were better, but not satisfying, at least not for my eyes.
The output format left a lot to be desired or was not appropriate for use on a PDA.
No integrated support for vocabulary study. Looking up a word in a dictionary is at least for me an act of overcoming my laziness. Jotting the word I've just looked up down into some vocabulary notebook is out of the question. A functionality that allows me to easily copy an entry from the search results into a vocabulary list was a definite necessity.

Realizing that I wouldn't really be happy with any of the dictionary readers I had found, I set out to 'roll my own'. The result is the software introduced here. Although Babbletower was initially developed for use with the Japanese dictionaries I mentioned above, it is a generic dictionary reader that is not limited to working with Japanese dictionary data.