Export formats

I’ve started a first pass at allowing zdt to support additional file formats (besides it’s own). There is now an extension point for it so I (or anyone else) can easily add new formats. So far I’ve added support for the VTrain rtf format and it seems to work ok. Any others that people care to see?

1 comment February 28th, 2006

My (monthly) update

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been working on some other projects, but don’t worry though, I’ve still reserved some time for zdt work. Also sorry if you noticed the blog being offline for periodically. I’m using Dreamhost as my webhost and I’m not too happy with their reliability. They have really great deals, but who cares if their servers are always down. Any recommendations for a new one?

So what can you look forward to in the next version of zdt? I’ve already added “any tone” search which IMHO is really cool. (for the tone impaired) Say you heard the word mănyì, but you’re not sure about the tones. Previously, you could only look them up in the dictionary by trial and error using the various combination of tones. Now, you can do a search for ‘man_yi_‘ where the underscore ‘_’ will match any tone. Besides some other bug fixes, I’ve also made some other UI related changes that hopeful result in more polish to the application. If anyone knows a good icon designer that would be willing to volunteer some of his time, please refer him to me.

3 comments February 26th, 2006

Sound plugin released

I just put the first version of the sound plugin on sourceforge. It does not yet contain a complete set of the pinyin sounds. Download it from here. It currently weighs in at about 15.6mb.

To install, just drop it in to your [zdt_install_dir]/plugins directory. There will be a ‘Play sound’ option when you use the right-click menu of the Dictionary View or any Category Editor. There will also be a ‘Read Text’ icon in the Annotation View toolbar that will read all characters in that view. Note that there’s no current way to cancel the Read Text function once it starts!

I’m mainly interested in seeing if this mechanism of playing sounds works on every system. I’ve noticed on my Linux box a noticeable lag when playing a sound for the first time (after startup). So i’m also curious at how the plugin performs. Suggestions are welcome!

5 comments February 4th, 2006