zim-dictionary-server 1.0.1

Serves contents of ZIM archives in a way optimized for convenient dictionary lookup.

zim-dictionary-server

Serves contents of ZIM archives in a way optimized for convenient dictionary lookup.

• Allows looking up a term in multiple ZIM archives simultaneously.
• Automatically looks up the lower-case form of a term given in an upper-case form.
• Allows looking up a term by any of its inflected forms, provided an inflection database or an inflection script. (This is useful for quickly copying the term from some text.)

See the manual for more information.

One notable dictionary available in the ZIM format is Wiktionary, which can be downloaded from the Wikimedia downloads page or from the Kiwix Library. Wiktionary ZIM archives can be trimmed and reduced in size with wiktionary-zim-trimmer.

An inflection database in a format expected by this program can be generated from Wiktionary data with wiktionary-inflection-index. The database may be inconveniently large for some heavily inflected languages (e.g. Finnish), in which case using an inflection script instead may be a better option.

Dependencies

• Python 3
• SQLite (optional)
• python-libzim, version 3.8 or any compatible

Installation

This program is distributed on PyPI, and the easiest method of installing it is to use pipx — simply enter the following in the terminal:

pipx install zim-dictionary-server

You can also manually install the dependencies and run zim_dictionary_server.py directly.

Usage

See the manual for instructions.

For convenience, you may want to add the server as a search engine in your web browser.

You may also want to configure your desktop environment to bind a shortcut for a script which looks up the currently selected text. Such a script may look for example like this:

#! /bin/bash

query=$(wl-paste --primary | python -c "from urllib.parse import quote; print(quote(input()))")

url="http://localhost:1111/$query"

if curl --head --fail --no-show-headers --silent "$url"; then
    exec firefox "$url"
else
    notify-send "Not found"
fi

License

This program is released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later. See LICENSE for more details.