Soothill

Mike, is there any chance that you guys will be converting Soothill to a Pleco-friendly format? I saw that you mentioned this in an earlier thread and I think it would be a great addition to your company's offerings.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well you could convert it yourself with the user dictionary import feature, but we certainly might be able to do an official version - the main question is the copyright status. (or was there already some discussion about that?)
 
It'd be great if you could, Mike, especially if it's the updated version. Also, kenianbei, could you PM me? I have a question I was hoping you could help me with.
 

kenianbei

秀才
whitebigsanitation said:
It'd be great if you could, Mike, especially if it's the updated version. Also, kenianbei, could you PM me? I have a question I was hoping you could help me with.

I don't see any way to pm you, do you have it turned on in board preferences? I checked and it's on for me. Maybe you can just directly pm me?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We turned off PMs after an incident in which about 1/2 of PlecoForums' members got spammed by a bot - phpBB's abuse prevention system doesn't seem to be strong enough to prevent those sorts of attacks, so we're waiting to re-enable them until it gets upgraded (or we switch to another bulletin board system like vBulletin).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I'm generally not inclined to charge people to download something a free / public-domain dictionary like that, though I suppose if it was a particularly onerous conversion project it might make sense.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Soothill's more likely given that it's public-domain; specialty dictionaries aren't generally expected to be big money-makers for us, so I'm really just as happy releasing a free one as releasing a commercially-licensed one that may take years to even cover its royalty advance.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Maybe, but I'm not big on nickel-and-diming, particularly not when it comes to something that others have generously invested their time in converting / making available in electronic format for free.
 

gabor

探花
merry christmas

Ones interested in the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, you can try importing this file:
update: simplified and traditional must be swapped, just a sec!
new file:
I changed the encoding to Unicode (I used UTF-16LE for successfully importing into Pleco),
this way the sanskrit diacritic signs remain intact.
I deleted 3 empty entries. I believe I changed nothing else :) Good luck with it!

Btw, the original file I used for converting can be found here:
http://ftp.usf.edu/pub/ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/Buddhdic_cn_utf8.txt
Many versions of this dictionary can be found similar to this one on the Internet, all in the same format, but if it is not allowed to convert it to Pleco, then please just delete my post. I have absolutely no idea about its copyrights.
 

Attachments

  • Buddhdic_cn_30_Jun_2010_pleco_v2_unicode.zip
    1.1 MB · Views: 1,274

dcarpent

榜眼
The file that you found and converted is a mere faction of the actual dictionary. What is included in the file that you used is only the head words, pinyin, and brief definitions. The actual online dictionary has full, detailed articles on each word, some quite long. The online version has limited access (something like 10 searches in any 24 hour period, if I recall correctly). Full access requires paying a fee. I would love to have the full version (which is continually updated), if some agreement could be reached with Charles Muller, who maintains the database. This is a far more valuable dictionary than Soothill. I would definitely pay extra to have it on Pleco, even though I already pay the fee to have unlimited use of the online version.
 

gabor

探花
dcarpent said:
The file that you found and converted is a mere faction of the actual dictionary. What is included in the file that you used is only the head words, pinyin, and brief definitions. The actual online dictionary has full, detailed articles on each word, some quite long.

I have to say I actually prefer to have the dictionary this way, instead of the encyclopedic articles written by mostly academic scholars and researchers. In fact, the only reason I use this dictionary, is to quickly check the sanskrit names of disciples and places and so on. I thought if this file is distributed in such way, it must mean that some other people also use it like this: so I made it available for Pleco.

As far as I can remember, all you need to do in order to have access to the full articles (online), is to contribute some (maybe 10?) articles of your own.

All the best!
 
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