20160328

dictionary.com as a XDXF

What's up world.

So, lately (a couple years ago actually) I have been extremely pissed with the lack of good English dictionaries on the net, and especially on eBook Readers.

See, I used to own an Onyx Boox a long time ago when eReaders were still a novelty. On my defunct Onyx, we could copy/paste dictionaries in StarDict format somewhere in there, and then we could use them while reading a book. Pretty awesome. StarDict dictionaries are lying around on the interwebz and it was easy to grab a few of them 'free of charge.' If you know I mean. Then we could also convert some old Babylon dictionaries to StarDict (that is before Babylon switched to a more locked down format).

Life was almost good. But then lately my Onyx broke the fuck down, and its battery became very erratic. So I bought a PocketBook Lux 3 (626) last week.

This new eReader is pretty awesome. No Android OS there sure, but seriously, this home made Linux OS is very well made. Better than the one from Onyx actually IMHO.

Well anyway, there is only ONE thing that was grinding my gears (and balls):
Even though we can put our own dictionaries in there, it only support ABBYY dictionaries. And these are much less common. So for once in my lifetime, I was ready to BUY a dictionary on their shit Polish platform or whatnot. But the issue is that the available dictionaries are simply SHIT. I mean, they don't have my lovely American Heritage 4th Edition. Therefore, yeah, they are SHIT.
Doesn't matter some Russian dudes made an XDXF to ABBYY converter. It's right there, hosted by me because... just because.

So... since I was really pissed lately (for a couple years) because of the lack of availability of various dictionaries -- whether for eReaders or even on the net in general -- I decided to hack something myself.

The idea is the following:
Creating the American Heritage in an XDXF format which can then be converted in any other format by the smart people on the interwebz.

Except that, instead of the AA 4th edition, I simply hacked dictionary.com and transformed it in an offline XDXF version.

Because, as I recall, dictionary.com was using the AA dictionary a long time ago. Then something changed and they moved to the Random House publishing company. But they were still providing the same dictionaries. And then dictionary.com became its own shit, and its own dictionary. So that's the one you will be downloading below.

So I managed to convert dictionary.com to an XDXF. But, I couldn't convert it to the ABBYY format using the Russian's dudes tool. I may work on that later.



Here is the XDXF file (547,620 KB unpacked):



For coders: go there and learn how to do what I did by yourself and get the source code of everything.
For free. So go and do it.



As for the legality of this whole thing, well, it's not. And I don't give a fuck.

So I advise you to download the stuff on this page even faster, and then to hide them somewhere very deep.

Now I need to convert that huge XDXF into an ABBY format... gotta think about that.

Peace.