The Dictionary Application (Dict App for short) is really helpful at times when you are reading an eBook / web page. I even define my own shortcut key so that when I high light a word and press “Control + Command + A”, the dictionary app will come up straight away and show me the meaning of the word that I’ve high lighted.
But there is just one little problem…the Dict App only comes with a few built-in dictionaries…for instance if I want to know the Chinese meaning of a particular word, I’ll need to search online / use something else. It would be great if I can add more dictionaries and make it the “one stop” app that I’ll ever need.
Well, it turns out that with the help of DictUnifier, you can add all kinds of dictionaries to the built-in Dictionary Application in Leopard. Take a look of my list 😉 (I only use a handful of the dictionaries, others are for my friends)
Ok, so the list might be a bit too long but I hope you get the idea 😉
Below is a step by step guide on how to add the dictionaries:
Step 1: Go to http://stardict.sourceforge.net/Dictionaries_dictd-www.dict.org.php and download the dictionaries that you will need. There are other dictionaries (like French / German / Chinese etc) on the web site too, so take your time and find the ones you need. Also, remember to rename your downloads so that it makes sense to you later on. For example, you can rename stardict-longman-2.4.2.tar.bz2 to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.tar.bz2 (don’t remove the .tar.bz2 extension!), trust me…you will probably need the full name later on 😉
Step 2: Next, download DictUnifier 1.0 to your desktop. If the link provided doesn’t work (they may update the application later on), you can always search DictUnifier on Google; find their homepage and download it from there.
Step 3: Double click on the DictUnifier.dmg and you will get:
Step 4. Drag the DictUnifier to your Application folder:
Step 5: Double click on the DictUnifier in your Application folder:
Step 6: The DictUnifier app should come up in a few seconds. The interface is nice and simple:
Step 7: Now find one of the dictionaries that you have downloaded previously (Here I’ve chosen the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) and single click on it so its selected:
Step 8: Now press the return key on your keyboard (which will allow you to rename the file):
Step 9: Select the name of the dictionary (in my case, its the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) and press Command + C on your keyboard to copy the name. (or you can go: Edit -> Copy)
Step 10: After you’ve done that, rename the file to something thats easy to remember. In my case, I’ve rename it to:
Q. Wait a minute…why do I have to do this?
A. When I first started using the software, some of the dictionaries that I’ve downloaded from the StarDict website can’t be converted using DictUnifier! After some time of trial and error, I have figure out that its the file name that is causing the problem. So this is kind of like a “workaround” for the software.
Step 11: Click on the Choose button (or anywhere inside the circled area):
Step 12: Find the dictionary that you’ve just renamed and click on the Choose button:
As you can see, the Dictionary ID is not very meaningful:
Step 13: Just paste the name that you’ve previously copied into the Dictionary ID area and click on the arrow indicated in the screen shot below:
Step 14: Now you are all set and ready to go. Click on the Convert button to start the converting process:
When the process have finished, the Dict App should come up and you will see something like this:
Q. Didn’t we rename the Dictionary already? Shouldn’t it be Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary instead of just Oxford?
A. Well…don’t ask me 😉 That’s the way its. If you want the dictionary names to be more meaningful, just follow the steps below to rename the dictionaries manually 🙂 (Don’t worry, its really easy!)
Step 15: Quit both the Dict App (just a reminder that Dict App means the built-in Dictionary Application in Leopard) and the DictUnifier:
Step 16: Go to your home folder (probably under your name, in my case, its called David) -> Library:
Step 17: Find the Dictionaries folder in the Library and open it up:
Step 18: Here you will find your dictionaries that you’ve converted. Our first step is to rename the folder to something more meaningful. (so that its easier for you to manage later on). You can rename the folder to anything you want, but remember to keep the “.dictionary” extension. E.g. You can rename it to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.dictionary
Step 19: After you have renamed the folder, open it up and you will see:
Step 20: Open up this folder as well, and you will see:
Step 21: Double click on the Info.plist:
Step 22: Click on the triangle next to the word Root so you can expand it:
Step 23: Here you have two places that you need to rename. One is the CFBundleDisplayName and the other is the CFBundleName. The CFBundleDisplayName is the name that you will see in here:
while the CFBundleName is the name that you will see in here:
Step 25: Now save your changes, quit the Property List Editor:
Now your Dictionary Application should display the dictionary names correctly:
– – – –
[…] Don wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe Dictionary Application (Dict App for short) is really helpful at times when you are reading an eBook / web page. I even define my own shortcut key so that when I high light a word and press “Control + Command + A”, the dictionary app will come up straight away and show me the meaning of the word that I’ve high lighted. But there is just one little problem…the Dict App only comes with a few built-in dictionaries…for instance if I want to know the Chinese meaning of a particular word, I’ll need to search online / use something else. It would be great if I can add more dictionaries and make it the “one stop” app that I’ll ever need. Well, it turns out that with the help of DictUnifier, you can add all kinds of dictionaries to the built-in Dictionary Application in Leopard. Take a look […] […]
辛苦了 谢谢
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for sharing.
Is there a easy way to remove the added dictionaries?
Re Mark: if you want to delete the dicts, you can go to your home folder/Library/Dictionaries and delete the unwanted ones.
E.g. my path to the dictionaries folder will be: Users -> David (your home directory will probably be named differently) -> Library -> Dictionaries
thanks David, will try this right away 🙂
Hey David!!
Thank you very much for this tutorial, it has greatly helped me with several of my translation-needs.
However, I have been unable to find a good Chinese – English dictionary. I was wondering if you might know of one that you could recommend? One where you enter the pinyin and get both an English and Hanzi response would be ideal.
Thanks again in advance.
You can rename them easier by control-clicking on the dictionary tab then selecting rename.
Re Luke:
first of all…thanks for your comments 😀
For Chinese – English dictionary, I use the “CEDICT for Apple Dictionary 1.2”: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/home_learning/cedictforappledictionary.html
The “CEDICT for Apple Dictionary 1.2” even have pronunciation in pinyin for the Chinese characters!!!
For Hanzi response, I use “现代汉语词典”, “高级汉语大词典” and “现代汉语词典”.
As you can see, I have quite a few dictionary…am not sure whether there is a dictionary that does everything…please let me know if you’ve found one that have pronunciation, as well as Chinese and English explanations 🙂
Hi Josh
Thanks for your tips 🙂
Using the “Edit Label” does work 🙂 But its not “permanent”. If I give my dictionaries to my friends…they will get the “original names”…so they have to rename them again. I would rather do the hard work once only and save everyone a bit of time 🙂
Hello there, this application seems to be extremely interesting… however, the dmg file won’t mount at all on Mac Os 10.5.2
Am i the only one having a problem with it? I tried downloading it from different locations, extracting the .bz2 file with different apps, no can do, the dmg file won’t mount.
Anyone can help me? thanks
This is great! I love the new dictionary app, and was wondering about whether you could add dictionaries to it.
Do you know if the complete Oxford English Dictionary is available anywhere as a .tar.bz2 file? That would make this app really complete.
Sorry about that, i was stupid, i extracted the dmg file from the BZ2 file when i should have mounted the BZ2 file directly, stupid me.
Great! Thanks for publishing.
I was afraid I won’t be able to add additional dictionaries until I have discovered this excelent howto. Thank you very much.
BTW: Does someone know how to add additional wiki’s? We have an own Wiki here for our IT stuff and I would like to access it directly from dictionary like the Wikipedia. Any ideas how to tweak the dictionary.app?
Cheers,
Horst
Excellent work man, very detailed tutorial etc.
Just one thing, when double clicking on a .plist it just opened it in TextEdit on my mac… I believe you need another apps installed in order to have the same thing as you did, so you might note that somewhere 😉 (it is easy to edit the file in TextEdit tho)
Anyway… great job again
Fantastic.
I also had to use TextEdit to edit the plist file. OmniOutliner kept opening the plist but the file could not be edited in Omni. So I googled (not having read Jerry’s comment) for plist editors and found that the developer package for Tiger contains a pkg called Property List Editor.app. But it is not installable as a standalone application. Somehow I finally decided to use TextEdit which works just fine. For some reason I was concerned that plist is binary and could not be edited with TextEdit as I had already tried with Omni…
Being able to add dictionaries is great, however there are no good spanish-english dictionaries that I can find. I’ve installed a few and they all seem to be very limited. How do you decompile the dictionary and add words???
Superb! Thanks so much, incredibly informative and helpful. Just what I was looking for.
Hi,
I would love to use this app and your tutorial but the Dictunifier wont open. I’m on macosx 10.4.11. do i need to be on leopard?
Hi jwalker,
I am using Leopard myself, so I wouldn’t know whether it works on 10.4.11. However, when I got time, I will install Tiger on my external hard drive and see whether it works 🙂
Hi David,
Thanks a lot for the great howto. I have a problem – I can’t find any English-Hebrew .tar.bz2 dictionaries. I have .dict, .idx and .idxc files from a crappy dictionary software I don’t want to use. Is there any way to convert it to .tar.bz2 so I could add it to the built-in dictionary app?
Thanks,
Or
Re: jwalker
According to the website:
“The target dictionary must be Dictionary 2.0 format defined in Mac OS X 10.5.”
You probably need to upgrade to Leopard 🙂
Fantastic, thanks a lot! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a Spanish dictionary (just monolingual, like Real Academia). Do you know any source?
Best, Stefan
Re: truegongfu
Hi there, thanks for your comment. I’ve found a few Spanish dictionaries here: http://stardict.sourceforge.net/Dictionaries_misc.php
Hope you will find them useful 🙂
Thanks for seeing that thru. don’t know about leopard. I’m only on a G4 so probably not worth the bother!
If you go into Preferences in Dictionary.app and double click on the label of the dictionary you’ve just imported, it lets you rename it without having to go in and edit the .plist. 🙂
Great tutorial though – thanks for this David! ^^
Hi Brett
Thanks for your comment 🙂 If you don’t edit the .plist and you’ve decided to reinstall / give the dictionaries to your friends, you will have to rename all the dictionaries again! So I would rather do it once for all 😉
Thx for your hardwork.
The current version of DictUnifier (1.1) doesn’t work according to these instructions. I kept on getting some kind of broken Python error. One must choose the ‘deprecated’ download, which is 1.0 in order to succeed.
I also had problems with Safari appending a .tar to the end of the stardict files I downloaded. Camino didn’t do this, so I used it to download them.
Otherwise, thanks a lot for these instructions!
Hi,
Thanks for sharing.
I use DictUnifier 1.1.0. With this version it is not necessary to paste the title in the Dictionnary ID field, like said in step 13. If the ID contains spaces, the conversion fails without clear warn.
It is not useful as well to rename the archive. DictUnifier retrieve the good title automatically.
Cheers,
Jc
Very clear tutorial, excellent.
Unfortunately after checking the convert button I get an error in the log, “tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
no .ifo files existed in /Users/paul/Documents/Silver surfer stuff/stardict downloads for dictorary/aaa.tar.bz2, not a valid stardict format” Tried lot of differnt files, same result.
I tried a shortened file name aaa.tar.bz2 and the version 1.0 of dictunifier. No joy, I am using OS 10.5.2.
Any ideas?
excellent tutorial, Dave! I didn’t even realized how nice it would be to have these dictionaries on my mac… i usually use dict.cn but i cant always be online, right
the reason i started looking for ways to add dictionaries is because i want to add new dictionaries to the “word of the day” screen saver.
anyone have a clue how i might pull that off?
Thanks again, Dave! nice work!
btw, sorry Jack im not sure what that problem is… i didnt have to rename my dictionaries… maybe (if u haven’t already) try not renaming them… good luck.
Very interesting and useful!
I got a few of the linked dictionaries to work fine, but unfortunately, the Russian “Dal” dictionary listed on the site returned an error. The Russian computer files were fine.
Other Russian dictionaries converted OK, but when I tried them in Dictionary.app, they would offer me a list of words to choose from, but when I chose, I got an error message. For example, with “RE-LingvoUniversal.dictionary”, any search returns “Format not supported”.
Otherwise, great project.
All the best.
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Great work! Thank you very much. Bow.
Thanks for this, it’s wonderful for dictionaries that work.
Can it support other formats, such as IDX? If so, how?
Please add some support for more Russian dictionaries, such as the one mentioned above – the Dahl or Даль dictionary.
Thanks!
Great help – thanks very much.
Does anyone know how I can source a British English dictionary?
DavidDonSco
Usefull tutorial thanks. To add dictionary to macos was so sophisticated before you.
hi there, tried to use a babylon dictionary (english to french) and when i try to look up a word, i get a ‘HTML data parsing plug-in is not found!’ error.
Has someone found the way to fix this ?
tia, xavier.
Anyone know where I can download a Medical dictionary file that would work with this program?
To Jack: Notice that some of the containing folders have spaces in their names. Move your dictionary file to your desktop folder, and you should solve your problem (or take the spaces out of each of the containing folders’ names).
XDXF data parsing plug-in is not found!
for Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, d’Alexandre Dumas (1873)
What does it mean?
Re: 42 Anonymous
Hi there, can you show me the download link to the dictionary that you’ve got? I will try it myself and see what happens, thanks.
Thank you for the great tips! I successfully installed some stardict dictionaries. but as 39 xavier mentioned, unfortunately there should be something wrong with the “stardict-babylon-xxx” files.
when i try to search words on the babylon dics, i get “Format not supported” or “HTML data parsing plug-in is not found” error. how can i solve this issue? thanks.
( i am on OS10.5.4 ppc)
[…] Of course, if English is not your first language, you can always get dictionaries in your own language. There are a wide variety of dictionaries in Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Korean, German, French, Japanese, Russian etc. After you’ve downloaded the dictionaries you want, you will need to install them so that StarDict can recognize the new dictionaries. "Install Dictionaries in Linux: To install these tarball dictionaries, do this: tar -xjvf a.tar.bz2 mv a /usr/share/stardict/dic Install Dictionaries in Windows: Use WinRAR to extract the .tar.bz2 file, which you get a directory, then move this directory to the dic, such as C:Program filesstardictdic" At the time of this writing, there is no StarDict for Mac yet. But if you want to use the dictionaries from StarDict, you could follow the tutorial I’ve written some time ago on my blog: Adding dictionaries to the built-in Dictionary Application in Leopard […]
Hi, David.
As I mentioned above, I have some trouble in using dictionaries converted from stardict-babylon files. I grabbed them from a site “StarDict Babylon Dictionaries — 星际译王的巴比伦词库(reciteword.sourceforge.net/stardict/babylon.php)”.
Could you give it a try on one of these files?
Kind Regards,
Sang-un
I tried installing the two Thai dictionaries in the misc section (English Thai Lexitron and Thai English Lexitron).
The English Thai installed but with errors. There are no entries for the english letter ‘r’ and many other letters which I found very unusual for a dictionary with over 52,000 entries. There was an error on installation. I think only part of the dictionary was installed. Many of the letters of the alphabet seemed to be limited to 1000 entires.
The Thai-English dictionary did not install properly as there was a “parsing error”.
Any ideas.
Ajouter des dictionnaires à OS X…
Mac OS X est livré avec une application Dictionnaire. C’est sympa on peut l’intégrer au spotlight et tout et tout…Seul hic, mais de taille, tous les dictionnaires sont en anglais ! Voici un tutorial pour ajouter des dictionnaires français offlin…
Hi David,
What Theme do you use in leopard? i like your pictograms!!!
greets
peter
[…] Unfortunately, my Hackintosh only comes with wikipedia in the dictionary. Then I run into this post telling how to add new sources. I recommend Oxford’s dictionary. Longman’s contemporary […]
David,
Thanks for your tip. The instructions are really easy to follow. While installing some dictionaries I had a problem, though. Maybe you can help me. The Babylon dictionaires that I’ve got at Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=80679&package_id=240210) are apparently processed OK by DictUnifier (for instance, the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia). They’re listed by Dictionary.app, the words appear on the program window, but when I select a word I get the message “Format not supported”. Do you have any clue to a workaround?
If wikipedia can be opened in the Dict App, can on-line dictionaries also be opened through the Dict App. I would like to add http://www.dict.cn for chinese / English. Also does anyone know why you can’t look up the Dict App by highlighting a word and selecting “look up in dictionary” from the contextual menu in Microsoft Word for Mac? It works in other applications. Odd. Cheers
1.1 version of DictUnifier has been released, you just have to download the dictionaries, choose them in the program, and then, when adding, rename with the right-click in the dictionary. Thank for the help
Anyone try DictUnifier with the electronic (CD-ROM) version of Merriam-Webster’s 11th Edition Collegiate dictionary? It’s kind of insane that they are still only offering a PowerPC version of their software for Mac, requiring Rosetta translation (and with it the extra RAM and resource consumption)
It’s odd. I used the DictUnifier and installed the KangXi dictionary, but I can’t find it in my Library/ Dictionary folder. All the other dictionaries are there but not this one, but it shows up in the list of dictionaries that I could choose from. Due to the fact that it doesn’t work, I want to delete it but don’t know how. Could anyone possibly give me some data on this? Thank you!
Re: strayduck. is there any way to add a commercial dictionary like Meriam-Webster or American Heritage to the Apple Dictionary.app?
Nice post, thanks!
Thanks for your great job, David.
Two issues:
1. I could not find any Spanish definitions StarDict files. We who need them should assemble forces to produce one. I don’t know where to begin, though.
2. When I download some of the StarDict dictionaries, they come out as and DictUnifier fails to recognize them. I tried decompressing them and recompressing them back as tarballs, but then DictUnifier fails to recognize the dictionaries inside them. Am I the only one with this issue? Does anyone have a clue as to what I should do?
Still, the Dictionary.app will now become much more usefull than before to me.
thank you very much for your article. It was very helpful.
Such a pity, and hard to understand though, that there ain’t yet no Spanish dictionaries avaliable.
Great Tutorial = I was able to understand it.
But,
Similar problem as Xavier, Anonymus, San-Sung or Victor : Everyting seems to go well but when I enter a word, I get a ‘XDXF data parsing plug-in is not found!’
It happens for the two french dictionnaries I have download so far :
XMLittre French dictionnary Le Littré
Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 8ème édition (1935)
Is it worked, that would be a real improvment. As anybody found a solution yet ???
Thank you
To David:
Many thanks for your really clear explanations, David !
So useful for non very skilled users like me.
多谢!Merci beaucoup.
牛年快乐,万事如意 !
To Claude:
Yesterday (Jan. 31st), the dictionaries you are looking for have been modified for the Stardict format, and so (maybe or should be), for Dicionary.app.
You can download them from here :
http://xdxf.revdanica.com/down/index.php
I’ve installed them in dictionary.app with no success (just can get dictionary titles and dictionary entries without any definition), but they all work perfectly in Stardict.
I also had this problem with the same French dictionaries before. That’s why, I’ve opened a discussion on the forum of Revdanica website (for AF dictionary). You can follow the discussion here:
(Be careful to copy all between ).
This is excellent! Thanks very much.
I use the dictionary all the time but it annoys me that is uses the “New Oxford American Dictionary” instead of the “New Oxford English Dictionary”. Many of the definitions are dumbed down and on occasions just plain wrong and so I have little confidence in it’s definitions of words I am unfamiliar with.
Is there anyone how knows how to add the “New Oxford ENGLISH Dictionary”?
Excellent help; many thanks.
Any guidance regarding Colin’s suggestion as well? That is:
“If wikipedia can be opened in the Dict App, can on-line dictionaries also be opened through the Dict App.”
You can hover the cursor over a word and hit ⌃⌘d (cmd-ctl-d) to popup a little panel telling you the definition of the word. Saves opening Dictionary.app to look up one word.
I’d be great if there’s any medical dictionary to put into Dict App.
I am willing to pay for the Stedman’s Electronic Medical Dictionary for Mac, but the only reason not to is that I want it in Dict.App
Have anyone an idea of how this could work out beautifully?
Or to incorporate the medical online dict into Dict.App??
Thank you very much David, BTW
This is great! I’m trying to source a medical definitions file at the moment to use and give out to anyone who wants it.
As a med student – having these terms on your desk would be fantastic, but I ain’t shellin out for those expensive ones. I mean – they’re words. We all own them right??!
Thanks for all the help, I’ve been wanting to add some French dictionaries for a while.
I do have a question though: my dictionaries aren’t showing up in the Library folder, and I can’t find them anywhere so I can’t change their names (although they have been added to the Dict App). How can I locate their folders?
P.S. I’ve tried all the normal ways, including Spotlight
Thanks very helpul.
I also received parsing erros on some dictionaries but it worked perfectly on others
I am really surprised that Apple doesn’t make this an easier process
Hi, thanks for the tutorial but is there a way that we can add online dictionary? for example i want to use http://m.seslisozluk.com like wikipedia in dictionary application. Is there any way to do it?
Hi,
Thanks so much for sharing. It worked great and now I can have my French homework done so much faster than before. I only have a small question: would it still work if I remove Dictunifier and the dictionaries I’ve downloaded?
Best
Hi david,
I cant find any English-Malay dict anywhere in the internet. How can I create my on dict and plug it in into the apple dict?
Or is there a way to edit or modified the existing apple dict so that I just add my own text to the original apple dict text.
thanks
Hi (from France).
Marvellous, and i add the french-english and english-french dictionaries, it so simple !!!! Now my dictionary application is a very powerful and free tool for everyday work (to search in wikipedia in many langages and look on a translation of the main topic on the same time).
Thanks
[…] installed some English-Russian and other natural-language-oriented dictionaries. I did that using these instructions. This map of languages is pretty awesome, and I’m using this Russian grammar tutorial as my […]
The order of appearance can be changed in the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DictionaryServices file. In the current, 10.5.6, plist editor, the items can be dragged to change the order.
Thank you for the great hint.
Firstly, thank you for this great tips.
However, I cannot get it done using your steps.
I could download fromStarDict some dictionaries.
I could also download the DictUnifier.
I could use DictUnifier to Choose and Convert the StarDict downloaded dictionaries.
System could automatically launch Dictionary when StarDict finishes its Convert.
However,…
I cannot see any of the dictionaries Converted by DictUnifier.
I cannot see any addition into the Dictionaries folder within both the Root and User level’s Library folders.
My system:
– iMac with OS X 10.5.6
– DictUnifier 1.1.0
– Dictionary 2.0.2 (51.4)
Two StarDict’s dictionaries tried:
– stardict-Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English-2.4.2.tar
– stardict-dictd-easton-2.4.2.tar
Anyone, please, advise if I had done correctly.
Thanks.
Thanks, very useful!
David,
thanks for the in-depth instruction. I did it all till Step 14, yet after completing a part of Step 14 (when it pops out the Dictionary), the dictionary I wanted to install (in my case English Etymology) wasn’t listed among other dicts in the Dictionary app. What am I doing wrong?
I’m using Leopard 10.5.7.
Here’s what I get:
cat: .sdconv-temp/dict-English: No such file or directory
cat: Etymology/DictInfo.plist: No such file or directory
sh: line 0: pushd: .sdconv-temp/dict-English: No such file or directory
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python: can’t open file ‘build-dict.py’: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
sh: line 0: popd: directory stack empty
ifo_file = .sdconv-temp/stardict-EnglishEtymology-2.4.2/EnglishEtymology.ifo
dict_id = English Etymology
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=’/Applications/DictUnifier.app/Contents/Resources/sdconv-current/bin’ ‘/Applications/DictUnifier.app/Contents/Resources/sdconv-current/bin/sdconv’ ‘.sdconv-temp/stardict-EnglishEtymology-2.4.2/EnglishEtymology.ifo’ ‘.sdconv-temp/dict-English Etymology/Dictionary.xml’
dict_name = English Etymology
I had the same problem on my first attempt. However, as mentioned elsewhere in this chain, the Dictionay ID value must not contain spaces.
After eliminating the spaces from the Dictionary ID field value, the DictUnifier utility worked OK and the dictionary was added.
The name in the info.plist had to be edited as described in the article.
To those who want to use babylon dictionary converted to stardict, the dictunifer now not support the stardict 3.0 dictionary (which the converted babylon dictionary is stardict 3.0)
So, the dictionary.app is not supported those converted babylon dictionary.
Hope that DictUnifer will support the stardict 3.0 dictionary soon!
[…] original post here: Adding dictionaries to the built-in Dictionary Application in Leopard « David’s logbook Share and […]
Hi!
Thanks for the great tutorial!
One question though. When I open the Info.plist, it opens on TextEdit which is fine, but when I change the dictionary names, it doesn’t seem to register on the CFBundleDisplay name.
Any advice?
An easier way to make the name of your new dictionary appear among the list of other dictionaries is to readjust the order in which your dictionaries will appear when used. It seems this is all Dictionary needs to “reboot” itself and find your new dictionary and its name.
This worked for me. Maybe it will work for you.
[…] ở đây, cũng không phức tạp lắm. Nhưng các bạn phải đọc bằng Tiếng Anh. https://davidtse916.wordpress.com/200…on-in-leopard/ Ai có thời gian thì chịu khó dịch để quảng bá cho mọi người với. Mình […]
To those who want to use babylon dictionary converted to stardict, it’s actually possible (I did it).
Just go to the issue page of DictUnifier:
http://code.google.com/p/mac-dictionary-kit/issues/detail?id=4
There are two patched version of the program in the comments. I tried the first one and it worked like a charm 🙂
If it doesn’t work for you, just try the second patch.
[…] النتدي الي تذكرها بس انا اتبعت الطريقة الي موجودة هنا، صح مرة طويله ومعقدة بعض الشئ. بس انا عملتها في اول […]
SNOW LEOPARD:
using DictUnifier in 10.6 doesn’t seem to work anymore
tar: Error opening archive: Failed to open ‘/Users/philod/Desktop/sources/Dictionary.app’: No such file or directory
no .ifo files existed in /Users/philod/Desktop/sources/Dictionary.app PlugIns/DICTS ORIG/Dictionary of Computing.tar.bz2, not a valid stardict format
anybody know a way around?
Thank you so much for this guide! It has helped me exponentially!
Great tutorial.
I am a fantasy author and constantly am creating new words and their associated definitions. Is there a way I can create my own dictionary and definitions and then add these to the dictionary list?
Cheers
Heart
David,
Worked the first time.
I deserve a beer, and I’m going to have one for you to.
Thanks,
Mike P.
I love that you have snapshots of every step, that you leave nothing to be assumed or imagined or guessed at, that you explain everything in finite detail.
Thank you so much. You are my manual-writing _hero_.
Hi!
Can someone tell me how to remove completely a downloaded dictionary (from Stardict) that is not working, but the name of the dictionary is still showing in the list of dictionaries available even if it is unchecked. This dictionary is the Académie française dictionary.
Thanks for your attention.
PS: To: David: Congratulations for your great work.
Now I have so many dictionaries that I want and I need to remove one! Is it possible?
Thanks a lot for this ! Very helpful. How can I make these dictionaries now appear on the Dictionary Widget ? They only appear on the Dictionary App.
Thanks !!
[…] en este post podreis ver como se pueden añadir más fuentes (diccionarios) a vuestro […]
Well, I´m with the same problems as some guys described (Chan-14/06/09 and matic 25/06/09). I´m trying to install the German Dict ldaf (Langenscheidt grossworterbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache)
Everything runs perfectly fine. I wrote the Dict ID without spaces as MacHovis suggested in reply to matic, but still i cannot see the dictionary at the dict.app.
Also, I´m not being able to edit home/Library/Dictionaries/ldaf.dictionary. All I see is an icon like a LEGO. When I try double clicking, a msg appear and says there is no application associated.
I can enter the directory though via terminal. All Dictionaries are install at /Library… but the one I am trying is at my home. I have already tryed to move the file to the same directory where all the others are.
I´m new to mac, so any help is welcome!
thanks
Thanks for the walk-through, it is great.
I do have one question however, what if I want to create my own dictionary first and then use DictUnifier to put it in my Apple Dict App?
Thanks,
John
Hi,
Can I add Urban Dictionary to the built in dictionary application?
nice share, thanks!!
Thanks for sharing. Well detailed and very useful. => Grazie per aver condiviso le informazioni. Ben dettagliato e molto utile.