Possible to add other free dictionaries? How?

foofurrah

Member
I was curious if it's possible to add other .pdb format dictionaries to use on the iPhone. I know there are many paid and several excellent free options available, but I'd like to add an idiom dictionary and a few others. I see the "Manual Upload" button and have successfully uploaded a few dictionaries, but I can't get Pleco to do anything with them. I checked the manual and various webpages but the directions for iPhone are absent. Perhaps the files I have are not correctly formatted. Anyway, can users add other dictionaries to Pleco, and if so, how? Thanks for any guidance.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
If those free dictionaries are in .pdb, they were probably made for the old version of Pleco (1.0) with our old MakePlecoDict utility, and won't work with version 2.0, which is what our iPhone software is based on.

At the moment, there's not any way to get a non-Pleco-created dictionary into our iPhone software. However, the next iPhone update should include our user dictionary feature, which lets you create new entries right on your iPhone, and includes the capability to import entries from a text file (formatted the same way as with that old MakePlecoDict utility, in fact). There are already a few user-created Pleco dictionaries floating around in that format (file extension .pqb), which should work just fine on iPhone once we release that update, and you can easily create others with that import function. And as of the latest Palm/WM update, user dictionaries should stay nice and fast even in dictionaries with tens of thousands of entries. The one limitation is that our user dictionaries don't support full-text search yet, but that should be coming in a future update (actually very easy to add, but for a number of reasons it would be a bad idea to do so until we officially drop support for Palm OS).
 
1) Would LOVE a free idiom dictionary.

2) Please drop support for Palm quickly (it's dead, we all know it) so we can get full text searching sooner!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Is there a free idiom dictionary out there? I haven't seen a good one yet that's not of questionable provenance copyright-wise...
 

phatav8r

Member
mikelove said:
Is there a free idiom dictionary out there? I haven't seen a good one yet that's not of questionable provenance copyright-wise...

what copyright? Chinese idioms are not the original work of any one person, even a collection of original work isn't necessarily protected under copyright law.

But, I am pretty sure there are some free ones around. The Chinese love the iphone too much not to be making them. And even if it is a $.99 upgrade for most common 1000, it is worth it. If i knew how to program, I would use my list of favorite 500 I have learned over the years.

Anyone want to help me learn?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
But translations / explanations of idioms are copyrightable - you (probably) can't copyright just a list of words, that's why we can offer free flashcard list downloads on our website worry-free, but once you start translating and /or explaining them you start creating something original enough to qualify as copyrightable. And I don't want to end up on the business end of a pricey international lawsuit from whichever Chinese publisher such-and-such "free" idiom dictionary turns out to have been taken from.

(fortunately, with the much-improved user dictionary feature that's finally coming to iPhone in the 2.1 update, you can swap dictionaries yourselves without our help...)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yes, that can be downloaded through the "Free" section of the "Add-ons" tab along with CC-CEDICT et al.
 
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