[kde-edu]: ANN: First major release of Eclectus

[Jeremy Whiting]

On Tuesday 01 December 2009 1:16:49 pm Christoph Burgmer wrote:
> First major release of Eclectus, a dictionary for Han characters
> 
> I would like to announce the release of Eclectus 0.2beta, which is the
>  first major release so far. Eclectus is a dictionary for Chinese character
>  (Han character, Hanzi, Kanji) based languages like Mandarin Chinese or
>  Japanese.
> 
> Chinese characters pose special demands on learners not found in alphabetic
> languages. Chinese for example needs the learner to acquire more than 3000
> characters to become fluent in reading, and the writing system itself only
> provides marginal hints on the pronunciation of words. The evolution of
> Chinese characters has produced a multitude of interconnections between
> glyphs, and an analysis of radical and phonetic elements has proven
>  essential for teaching and learning characters. Eclectus wants to address
>  these challenges.
> 
> Eclectus provides several features not found in traditional paper-based or
> electronic dictionaries:
>   - Look-up on mouse selection,
>   - Forgiving search and hints to graphically similar characters,
>   - Quick-access radical table,
>   - Component based search (aka multi-radical),
>   - Handwriting recognition,
>   - Stroke order information,
>   - Audio, and
>   - Character component trees.
> 
> Eclectus runs on KDE4 (using PyKDE) and depends on the relatively new
>  cjklib and is available under the GPL. It supports the major dictionaries
>  CEDICT, EDICT, and HanDeDict. More features are given in the project's
>  wiki [1]. For screenshots and a screencast see [2].
> 
> Packages are readily available for Debian and RPM-based distributions [3].
> Ubuntu packages can be installed from the personal package archive at [4].
> There is a short page on how to install under [5].
> 
> Eclectus is still in beta phase. The program has some rough edges, but
>  users are encouraged to give it a try and report back issues. Many tasks
>  are still on the TODO list, and developers are welcome to join the
>  project. One major task will be porting to pure Qt, so that in future
>  versions support for MS Windows and Mac OS can be offered.
> 
> I'll be happy about any constructive feedback

That looks very awesome, (as do your other projects) as an american who lived 
in Taiwan and knows some bit of chinese but needs to review/relearn most 
characters this looks simply amazing! I'll be trying it out later tonight for 
sure.

Jeremy

> 
> -Christoph Burgmer
> 
> [1] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/About
> [2] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/Screenshots
> [3] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/downloads/list
> [4] https://launchpad.net/~cburgmer/+archive/ppa
> [5] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/Install
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