Dictionary Support on the Neo

**Michael Kozlowski** · 03-11-2010

he Neo comes with dictionary support. This short post will guide you on installing and using your dictionary.

To use the dictionary support you will first need to install a dictionary to the Neo. The dictionaries comes in a special format that uses the DICT dictionary network protocol. These dictionaries will have the dict file extensions.

The dictionary function is only as good as the dictionary you have installed - you can download free ones or buy commercial ones - on the free ones you may occasionally need to switch between dictionaires to find a word - luckily you can do this within the search so its just a an extra tap of the stylus. One of the better free ones is the WordNet dictionary created and mainted by Princeton University

You can down Wordnet and some of the other free dictionaries from here: http://stardict.sourceforge.net/Dict...w.dict.org.php

Installing a dictionary

We will use Wordnet as an example, as personal experience found this dictionary to be fairly reliable. The WordNet one is the second one on the list, from the link mentioned above from the stardict website. You need to choose the tarball version. Click on the links in the tarball column to download the dictionary.

Now you have downloaded the dictionary in a tarball format, you need to extract the files you need from this compressed file. You can use any tools such as Winzip or 7zip.

If you do not already have a compression/decompression tool, download the 7zip tool - it is completlety free with no expiration date or nag screen and great compression/decompression tool. If your on windows and not sure if your running 32/64bit windows just choose 32bit so you can choose either of the first two links on this page http://www.7-zip.org/download.html, the mac and linux versions of 7zip are further down on this page. Once you have downloaded 7zip proceed to install it following the onscreen prompts. You can use other tools like winzip, but these programs are not free give you a nag screen if you are running them in demo/eval mode.

Once you have 7zip installed and downloaded a tarball of WordNet to your pc, double click the tarball wordnet file you downloaded earlier. It will open in 7zip and you should see a tar file - double click this, and you should see a folder. Drag and drop this folder to anyplace on your hard drive (make a note of where you are putting this!).

Now connect your Neo to pc or use an sd card reader to get to the sd card and in the root of the sd card create a folder called dicts ( use all letters in lowercase, always stick to lowercase where you can, plus its good practice to

). Now drag and drop the folder you uncompressed to the hard drive into the dicts folder on your SD card, i.e. in this example the stardict-dictd_www.dict.org_wn-2.4.2 folder. You can add as many dictionaries as you want - the folder stucture should look like this

SD card (root/top of the card) :
........... dicts (folder)
.................stardict-dictd_www.dict.org_wn-2.4.2 (folder)
.................another_dictionary (folder)
.................another_dictionary_2 (folder)

Inside each dictionary folder there should be three files present, ending in .dz , .dx and .ifo

Looking up a word

Now unplug your Neo from the pc / mac and open a book. Open up the menu, either by clicking the top position of the outer ring or using the stylus and clicking the arrow on the bottom left hand corner for the screen. The menu screen will vary according to which format the book is (rtf, pdf, epub etc), but you will need to select the Tools icon on the left hand side of the menu. On the right you can now select dictionary lookup function. You can use the stylus or the inner ring and ok buttons on the Neo to navigate through the menu. Yuor book should now appear with a small dicttionary screen either at the top or bottom of the screen. You will now need your stylus to click on the word you want to look up. If the Neo finds the word the Explanation button highlights on the dictionary dialog and the lookup results is played to the right of this. If your dictionary supports this you can use the Similar words button to list words that are similar, and click on them to jump to the explanation of the word chosen.

The other two buttons on the dictionary dialog are Dictionaries and Lookup functions. At the time of writing the lookup function does not work, I presume this button is meant for looking up a word that you type in. Future firmware updates should resolve this. The Dictionary buttons is to switch to another dictionary if you have more than one. Clicking on this list all the dictionaries it can read on the left and selecting any one of them switches the neo to that dictionary. As your previous word you tapped on the book is still highlighted the Neo will automatically look up the word in the new dictionary you have just chosen. To look up another word simply tap on any part of the word in the book. Tap on the X on the top right hand side of the dictionary dialog to close it and carry on reading.

You mileage with different dictionaries will vary, for example some of the other dictionaries I tried just gives me gobble de gook, or will not work quite as expected. So far the WordNet dictionary has given me the best usage out of the free dictionaries I have tried.

Have you tried another free dictionary or purchased one that works well with the Neo? If so post a reply, so we can build a list of dictionaries that work well with the Neo. Please also mention the firmware you are using if you are not using the stock bebook firmware, as different firmwares will give varied results.

Note:
At the time of writing, it looks like the neo is hard coded in the current firmware to only look for dictionaries on the sd card, although i wouldnt have thought it would be that hard to ammend in a future firmware update?

So for now, if you dont have a sd card already, time to dig an old one out - remember if you have any old micro, mini , trans sd cards etc lying around, you can use them as well (with the appropriate adapater to use it in an sd card slot).