DICTOOL(1) USER COMMANDS DICTOOL(1) NAME dictool - Dictionary lookup tool SYNOPSIS dictool dictionary [ -nName ] [ -iindex_file / -xnew_index ] [ -q ] ... DESCRIPTION dictool is an application, available for both SunView and OpenWindows, that allows you to look up, in less than a second, any word in any of 11 languages. It works in con- junction with the CD-ROM database ``Languages of the World'', which may be mounted in the Sun CD-ROM drive. This disc contains the complete text of all of the following dic- tionaries: Danish * Gyldendal Danish-English, English-Danish Diction- ary (110,000 entries) Dutch * Wolters-Noordhoff Dutch-English, English-Dutch Dictionary English * NTC American Idioms Dictionary, English-English Finnish * Werner Soderstrom Oskeyhtio Finnish-English, English-Finnish Dictionary. (70,000 entries) French * Harrap's Shorter French-English, English-French (350,000+ translations & examples) * Harrap's French-English, English-French Dictionary of Data Processing (18,000 headwords) * Harrap's French-English, English-French Science Dictionary (30,000 headwords) * Harrap's French-English, English-French Business Dictionary German * Harrap's Concise German-English, English-German Dictionary (95,000 headwords) * Oscar Brandstetter Verlag Dictionary of Exact Sci- ence and Technology, English-German, German- English (115,000 entries) Italian * Nicola Zanichelli: Il Nuovo Ragazzini, English- Italian, Italian-English Dictionary (128,000 entries) Japanese * Sansyusya English-Japanese, Japanese-English Dic- tionary (84,000 headwords) * Sansyusya Dictionary of Science and Technology, English-German-Japanese (163,000 entries) Multilingual * Nicola Zanichelli: Five-Language Dictionary-- English, German, French, Italian, Spanish (3,500 entries) Norwegian * Kunnskapsforlaget Norwegian-English, English- Norwegian Dictionary. (55,000 entries) Spanish * Grupo Anaya Spanish-English, English-Spanish Dic- tionary (250,000+ headwords, entries, and exam- ples) Swedish * Esselte Studium Swedish-English, English-Swedish Dictionary (240,000 entries) dictool displays a window with one entry panel for each dic- tionary it has been configured to access, and a scrollable text window in which material retrieved from the dic- tionaries is presented. If dictool is used to access the Spanish to English and English to Spanish dictionaries, the display will appear like this: __________________________________________________ | Spanish->English: arbol | |__________________________________________________ | English->Spanish: | |__________________________________________________ | arbol m. bot. | | tree: arbol de Judas, Judas tree;arbol de la | | ciencia del bien y del mal, bibl. tree of | | knowledge (of good and evil);arbol de la cruz, | | tree of the cross;arbol de la vida, bibl., bot. | | tree of life;anat. arbor-vitae;arbol de Navidad,| | Christmas tree;arbol frutal, fruit tree. | | | | 2 mech. arbor, shaft, axle, spindle: arbol de | | levas, camshaft. | | | | 3 naut. mast. | | | | 4 print. shank. | | | | 5 newel (of winding stairs). | | | | 6 arbol genealogico, genealogical tree. | |_________________________________________________| Using dictool is simple. Simply type the word to be retrieved in the panel for the appropriate dictionary and press RETURN. You may abbreviate the word to any prefix of the word to be looked up; for example, entering ``fia'' in the ``Spanish->English:'' subwindow will retrieve ``fiable'', the first word in the dictionary which begins with those letters. Once a word has been found, you can step through successive words in the dictionary simply by pressing RETURN in the subwindow you used to retrieve the word. After finding ``fiable'', successive depressions of RETURN display translations of ``fiado'', ``fiador'', ``fiambre'', and so on. If you enter ``-'' in the window and press RETURN, preceding words will be displayed. The ``-'' is not cleared from the entry panel allowing you to step backwards through the dictionary simply by pressing RETURN. If no word is found that matches the string you entered, * No match. * is displayed in the lookup panel, and the word is preserved so you can edit it and try again. In addition to searching for specific words, you can search for words that match a regular expression (of the same form used by ed, egrep, and awk) by entering a slash followed by the regular expression. For example, entering ``/^pesc.*r$'' in the ``Spanish->English:'' subwindow finds ``pescador'', the first word that matches that pattern. You can find successive words which match the same regular expression by entering just ``/''; after having found ``pes- cador'' entering just a slash will locate ``pescar''. Whether you type an explicit pattern or a regular expres- sion, all accented and variant characters are typed without accents or other special indications and are case insensi- tive. Hyphenated words and multiple-word entries are indexed as if all spaces and punctuation were deleted. The definition retrieved by dictool is displayed in a text subwindow, allowing you to copy and paste any portion of it into other applications. Accented characters are displayed using the ISO 8859/1 Latin 1 character set. Applications which do not correctly implement this 8 bit character code many not yield correct results when text from dictool is input to them via Paste. BUILDING AND INSTALLING To install dictool on your Sun workstation, extract it from the archive in which it was delivered into a directory of its own. Make this the current directory and edit the Makefile with your favourite text editor. Change the defin- ition of the macros at the top of the file, which are sup- plied as: CD = /cdrom IXDIR = /tmp/DictIndex BINDIR = /usr3/kelvin/localbin to the paths on your system which are to be used to access the CD-ROM drive on which ``Languages of the World'' is mounted, and the directory in which the index files created by dictool are to be placed. The index file direc- tory should be created manually with mkdir(1), and should be read-accessible to all users. Finally, BINDIR should be changed to the library directory in which the dictool executables and shell scripts are to be placed, for exam- ple /usr/local/bin. When you install dictool, you must have write permission in this directory. To build dictool, enter the commands: make clean make In a few moments you'll have executables called dictool, xdictool, and hdictool. Next, you need to create the index files which dictool uses to provide rapid access to the dic- tionary databases. (dictool will work with or without an index file; however, without an index file word searches can take up to a minute, limited by the transfer rate of the CD-ROM. With an index, virtually all lookups are completed in a fraction of a second.) To build all the indices, make sure the directory you speci- fied as IXDIR in the Makefile has been created, then enter: make indices This will take a while: anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour depending on the speed of your CPU and CD-ROM drive. When it's done, the index directory will contain 13 mega- bytes of index files (make sure you have enough room before entering ``make indices''!), and you're ready to complete the installation of dictool by entering: make install For this command to work properly, you must have write per- mission on the directory you specified as BINDIR in the Makefile. You may have to ``su'' to the owning userid first. If you only use one or two languages and want to save space in the index directory, you can manually build the indices for just the languages you wish. Rather than entering ``make indices'', which builds all the indices, make one or more of the following targets to index only those languages: idanish idutch ifinnish ifivelang ifrench igerman iidioms iitalian ijapanese inorwegian ispanish iswedish OPTIONS dictool is rarely executed directly. It requires parameters on its command line which specify the dictionary and index files it uses, and the names of the dictionaries it is accessing. Shell scripts are provided, custom configured by the installation process and copied to a library directory, which are used to invoke dictool as follows: danish_tool dutch_tool finnish_tool fivelang_tool french_tool german_tool idiom_tool italian_tool japanese_tool norwegian_tool spanish_tool swedish_tool Each command executes a copy of dictool which provides access to all the dictionaries in that language. For exam- ple, french_tool allows you to look up words in the general, science, data processing, or business dictionaries. You can invoke dictool directly, specifying the dictionaries to be searched, the names of the dictionaries, and the index files to be used on the command line. The command line con- sists of one or more dictionary file names which reference the CD-ROM, each followed by options that specify additional information about that dictionary. The valid options are: -ifile Use file as the index for the preceding diction- ary. file must have been previously created with the -x option of dictool. If no index is speci- fied for a dictionary, dictool will work correctly, but will run hundreds of times slower. -nName Use Name as the name displayed in the entry panel associated with the previous dictionary file. If no name is given, the dictionary file name is used. If the name contains spaces or character which would be expanded by the shell, it should be enclosed in double quotes. -q Exit immediately to Unix. This option is normally used in shell scripts and make files which invoke dictool to build dictionaries to prevent the interactive window from being displayed. -xfile Write an index for the previously named dictionary into file. If file previously existed, it will be overwritten. FILES The ``Languages of the World'' CD-ROM, needed in order to use dictool, is published by: National Textbook Company 4255 West Touhy Avenue Lincolnwood, IL 60646-1975 USA The publisher provides neither telephone nor FAX numbers anywhere in the product. You can order ``Languages of the World'' from: Bureau of Electronic Publishing, Inc. 141 New Road Parsippany, NJ 07054 USA USA: 201/808-2700 800/828-4766 Fax: 201/808-2676 ``Languages of the World'' has a list price of US$950, but Bureau of Electronic Publishing discounts it to a mere US$889. Before you pay that price, shop around! ``Languages of the World'' is frequently bundled with CD-ROM drives, and has appeared, by itself, discounted to less than US$100! In some cases, it's cheaper to buy a CD-ROM drive just to get ``Languages of the World'' cheaper, even if you don't need the drive. BUGS There are a few typos in the dictionaries in the ``Languages of the World'' CD-ROM. Some of these result in hex charac- ters appearing as in material retrieved from the dic- tionary. These may be safely ignored. The Japanese dictionary contains both Romanji and Kanji representations of the Japanese characters. I haven't fig- ured out how the Kanji font works, so the Kanji definitions appear as hexadecimal gibberish. The American Idioms dictionary is poorly indexed. Several of the dictionaries use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent pronunciation. Many of the spe- cial characters used in IPA have no analogues in the ISO Latin 1 character set, so I picked replacements which make as much sense as possible. This affects only given pronun- ciations. dictool must be run under SunOS 4.1 or higher, since earlier releases do not include the 8 bit ISO characters required to display accented characters. In addition, not all fonts supplied by Sun define the characters above 127; if you run dictool with your default font set to one of these, accented characters will display as garbage. Indexing is performed only on ``headwords,'' the word, usu- ally printed in boldface in paper dictionaries, that begins a definition. In some of the dictionaries an entry for a given headword may contain several variant forms of the word, or compound words that include it. These are not indexed, and can consequently be found only by searching for the headword and then browsing. (Of course, this is what you'd have to do with the book, but ideally dictool should index everything you might want to look up.) AUTHOR John Walker kelvin@fourmilab.ch