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Are They Still Working On ZDT?


Kobo-Daishi

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  • 8 months later...
  • 9 months later...

I discovered ZDT only a few days before. I'm very impressed and wanted to give it a new breath. I just updated the cedict plugin with the latest entries (102.556) from 2012-03-04. I want to share my work with the community but can't attach it to this forum due to file size limitation.

Also, I don't seem to have any problems that other developers reported. So, perhaps I can give ZDT a new breath...

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I just sent you both updated plugins to admin@chinese-forums.com

net.sourceforge.zdt.cedict_0.5.0.jar

net.sourceforge.zdt.handedict_0.5.0.jar

Thank you for making them available to the community. Please keep me up to date where the plugins have been published.

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I got write permissions at sourceforge right now, so I uploaded both plugins there:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zdt/files/zdt-dictionaries/cedict-0.5.0/net.sourceforge.zdt.cedict_0.5.0.jar/download

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zdt/files/zdt-dictionaries/handedict-0.5.0/net.sourceforge.zdt.handedict_0.5.0.jar/download

In the next step I'll update stroke recognition from now about 1.000 to over 3.000 characters.

Enjoy! :-)

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Downloaded it and copied it to my zdt/plugins directory.... and got the following error:

INFO : Loading XML bean definitions from class path resource [cedictContext.xml]

Exception in thread "Thread-3" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file

This is for a straight zdt 0.7.0 version under Linux.

EDIT: this also corrupted my user.script file. I had a back-up from yesterday so not much was lost, but just a warning for others.

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I updated both plugins (now version 0.5.1) so you should be able to use them with your ZDT version. Your ZDT uses still java 5 but the plugins were compiled with java 6. Thus, either you tell ZDT to use java 6 or newer OR you uses the re-compiled plugins of version 0.5.1.

Download links:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zdt/files/zdt-dictionaries/cedict-0.5.1/net.sourceforge.zdt.cedict_0.5.1.jar/download

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zdt/files/zdt-dictionaries/handedict-0.5.1/net.sourceforge.zdt.handedict_0.5.1.jar/download

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Since work has been re-started on the project, here are some features that I'd like to see added.

I'd like to see a more fully featured Internet browser. As it is the browser plug-in included is no more advanced than the original Mosaic or Netscape browsers from the 1990s.

A home page button would be nice. As would tabs.

If there's a way to add the Firefox browser to replace the existing one, that would be good.

Support for the Unicode extensions. I think we're up to D. E?

A way to add a personal dictionary/glossary would be great.

Sometimes I come across words that aren't in the existing CEDICt/Adso/Handedict dictionaries and might want to add them to such a personal dictionary.

Support for dictionary files for Stardict/GoldenDict would be cool.

There are tons of dictionaries available for those projects (some legal and some not so).

If I think of more I'll update but until then, keep programming. :)

Kobo.

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Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, I definitely want to add a search for the personal flashcard entries. Putting them into a personal dictionary would be redundant.

If other dictionaries are transformable into zdt format then yes, I could add them as well.

What do you mean with Unicode Extensions and what is D.E?

Adding a full featured web browser is very hard stuff. Firefox was embeddable until v4. As the project seems to be dead, there is no hope that newer firefox versions will be supported.

However, there is hope that Java 7 offers a web browser component, which I could integrate into zdt. The latest version (7 update 3) does not yet support it for Linux 64 Bit though. Also, I don't know if Mac OS's supports Java 7 already. So I think, the browser enhancement has still to wait.

Btw. why is this so important for you? What's the benefit to use zdt's browser instead of your prefered standalone browser?

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kaya, if you are going to start working on ZDT code itself (and I hope you do!!), and you care about what features others want (and whether you do is up to you -- afterall, you're doing the work, so you get to decide), you might want to look at this thread for ideas. Personally, my wish list is rather different than Kobo-Daishi; I agree with you that I can't see the use of an internal web browser. [That said, being able to click on the words and have it bring up that word in MDBG in an external browser, for example, would be nice!]

Maybe just start a new thread.

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Thanks jbradfor. I had a look at the thread.

Of course, my time is limited too but I already got some things implemented as for example audio flashcards.

Searching for user entries works as well already. Did this never work before? I'm asking because the code was already there but just commented out. Do you remember some issues or bugs with this? I want to enable this again.

It seems that I've to release a sandboxed version so you can play with it. Only problem is that I don't know yet how to build a release for the whole software ;)

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Maybe my purposes are different from that of the other forumites, but, when I started this thread back in 2010 after a dearth of updates to ZDT for 2 1/2 years, I envisioned ZDT becoming an integrated Chinese language research tool.

I know it's supposed to be mainly a Chinese language learning tool built around a flashcard program but still I thought it could be much more. An aid in researching Chinese characters at universities and the like.

As it is I have to go back and forth between many programs (Internet browsers, pdf programs, dictionary programs, etc.) just to research unusual characters I run across almost daily.

And also why I rarely use ZDT.

And seeing as it already included a browser I thought why not a fully featured one instead of this rudimentary one.

Kaya wrote:

What do you mean with Unicode Extensions and what is D.E?

When the first iteration of Unicode came out, they left out some of the rarer languages that didn't have fonts for them yet. But there are also a whole host of rare Chinese characters that they seem to dig out from some rare book, or some tomb discovery on silk or bamboo, or some unknown stele carving in a far off mountaintop temple, etc.

The Unicode people usually add these as extensions. Extension A, extension B, extension C, extension D and on.

I think we're on D right now. I'm not sure since I haven't checked recently. You need a font to be able to display these characters. I think the original Unicode used 2 bytes but later 3. I'm not sure. I'm not very technical minded. :)

Anyway, nowadays the characters that are being added seem to mostly be Chinese characters that they unearth. I think I read somewhere that more than 90% of the Unicode is already taken up by Chinese characters. Not sure if that's wholly accurate.

For instance, here are three rare characters I've come across this week in my readings.

http://i39.tinypic.com/zwnhhi.jpg

http://i40.tinypic.com/29kpcnb.jpg

The first character on top

http://i42.tinypic.com/zwbcm.jpg

http://i40.tinypic.com/255judj.jpg

The second character from the bottom on the right side.

http://i44.tinypic.com/118m36f.jpg

The GoldenDict program has an entry for the character but just the data from UniHan data file. Strangely the character doesn't show up in the program itself. It's an extension C character.

http://i39.tinypic.com/2eokzg7.jpg

I came across this in a dictionary comparing Taiwan & the Mainland. Is the variant supposed to be quite common?

http://i43.tinypic.com/10r0k9h.jpg

The GoldenDict has it but only in Chinese. If able to include user-defined entries, could have added "a variant for the character for spring". And strangely they don't have the character on the left side and on the input bar. This is an extension B character.

http://i42.tinypic.com/2ur8tcl.jpg

From the dictionary scan I at first thought the top part was a zhong (middle) with a tail. Kind of like simplified for lightening. But it's the dun character.

I know it's a big task so I won't belabor the point. I tried to learn programming after I didn't get any response to my initial post.

Let's just say learning Chinese is a lot, a lot easier than learning programming. :)

I just wish there was a fork of this project that would be for the research tool I envision.

Kobo.

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Yeah, I got my first windows installer working! :-)

However, the exe setup file is quite huge, 120 MB, 4 times bigger than zdt 0.8.0. I don't think that is only due to the updated dictionaries and stroke animations. I must have some superfluous dependencies. Well, at least it installs and runs correctly :-)

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I can't follow you. What's the problem with these unicode D characters? Can't you add them to your flashcards?

There are two potential problems.

The first is that internally Java represents text in UTF-16. This means that for characters in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) one character of a java string = one Unicode codepoint. The main CJK characters and also CJK Extension A are all contained in the BMP. For characters outside the BMP (extensions B, C, D) then for UTF-16 these need to be encoded using surrogate pairs, e.g. two characters of a java string = one Unicode codepoint. If the code has been written under the assumption that one character = one codepoint, then the program will not work correctly with any characters that require surrogate pairs (I'm not whether ZDT handles this correctly or not, just saying that this is one potential issue).

Assuming the first issue is not a problem, then the next problem will be that most fonts will not contain these characters anyway, and they will only be displayed if you have a font that contains glyphs for the extended characters.

@Kobo-Daishi, what this means, is that if you can use Extension B characters in ZDT (I've not tried it so I don't know), then if you have a font with the extension C or D characters in them you should be able to use them just fine.

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