[PROPOSAL] New project for dictionaries

[dennisroczek]

Hello community,

I was having some discussions with dictionary maintainers and come to a
completely new idea for a new project!

The TL;DR version: Provide a central place for dictionaries maintainers
including useful tools plus a possibility for easier collaboration.

The long version: LibreOffice uses dictionaries based on Hunspell.
Hunspell is a free, open source project. Many applications do support
Hunspell based dictionaries. The following list (but not
exclusive) of applications supporting Hunspell based dictionaries is
shameless copied from the German Wikipedia:
* AOO
* LibO
* Mozilla products
** Thunderbird
** Seamonkey
** Firefox
* Latex IDEs: WinShell, TexWorks, LyX, Texmaker, TeXstudio, etc.
* Google Chrome
* The Bat
* Emacs
* Opera Web Browsr
* Apple Mac OS X 10.6+
* Adobe InDesign
* Adobe FrameMaker
* SoftMaker Office
* Scribus
and many, many more applications.

Some applications additional provide their own dictionary extension page
to download dictionaries. Moreover depending on the applications, the
dictionary have to be differently packed (simplest example is a
different file extensions)

Some projects do maintain their extension separately (independently).
Also the user who wants to propose a change / an addition has mostly no
easy solution to find out whom to contact to get another word added.

The basis idea is to provide a portal which provides tools to pack the
word lists to dictionaries automatically by scripts and - if possible -
to update and upload the new version of the dictionary to the download
pages. (e.g. the extension centre of AOO / LO or Mozilla's page) The
portal should provide a way for users to help the maintainers and
proposing new words or contact the maintainer if there are errors in the
word list.

The manual work of packaging the extension is very time consuming and
moreover leads to situations that there might be multiple maintained
versions for the same language. By providing tools to create a new
version of the dictionary the maintainer can invest their time in
improving the dictionary and release easily more often a new version.

I'm eager to hear what do you thing about this idea.

Regards,

Dennis Roczek

[dennisroczek]

Hi Michael,

I think the different licenses across products might be a problem.
But not an expert.

In comparison to the Apache Foundation the Document Foundation has no
particular open source license mentioned in our statutes. The Document
Liberation Project for example uses many different licenses across the
different libraries.

On the whole, I'm not sure if the packaging is actually the
biggest stumbling block for the end user

Well the ideal part is that somebody provides an pre-backed "Binary" /
extension.

but the actual installation/implementation. Some are very easy,
like Mozilla or LO, you just get the file and it either
auto-installs or you click it. Others, like Trados, you have to
find the folder for the dic file, you have to manually add (if it's
not bundled) the locale to an XML file ... and pray it works.
Others, like Chrome, you can't actually add a spellchecker for a
language that Google hates.

We actually cannot do anything about the different implementations.
But we could provide as easiest packages as possible.

Though perhaps if there was a central place on the web for all
these so there's a single place where devs could point their
software for grabbing Hunspell dictionaries that might make things
easier. I'd be all up for that but it would probably end up an
exercise in herding cats. Maybe forking existing dictionaries might
be worth considering, if the owners are either non-communicative or
not interested?

If the maintainers are not responsive (or if the dictionary is
abandoned), we actually cannot do anything as long as we have no new
maintainer for a fork. If there is somebody willing to overtake the
development, then forking of that particular dictionary is indeed a
possibility.

Michael

</snip>

[sophi]

Hi Dennis, all,

Hello community,

I was having some discussions with dictionary maintainers and come to a
completely new idea for a new project!

The TL;DR version: Provide a central place for dictionaries maintainers
including useful tools plus a possibility for easier collaboration.

Sorry for the delay, I just wanted to share the FR experience here, the
dictionary and grammar tools are developed by Olivier using community
feedback (for several open source projects) here:
http://www.dicollecte.org/
On the dicollecte site, it's possible to add a word, edit an entry and
delete what is not necessary or submit an error. The technical part is
developed by Olivier and core contributors review the submissions.
Submissions currently reviewed are visible here for example:
http://www.dicollecte.org/propositions.php?prj=fr&tab=E
and the discussion about a word:
http://www.dicollecte.org/proposition.php?prj=fr&id=28588
Let me know if you would like some technical feedbacks on the platform,
workflow, scripts, and so on (not sure what would be interesting, I've
absolutely no skills here), I'll ping Olivier then (he is quite buzzy
Cheers
Sophie