[kde-edu]: ANN: Eclectus, Han character dictionary

[Christoph Burgmer]

Hi everybody,

I would like to announce Eclectus, a Han character dictionary especially  
suited for learners [1] (see screencast [2]).

Motivation

The lack of a good and user-friendly learner's dictionary for Chinese  
motivated the work in the past months that went into Eclectus. With more then 
40,000 mostly complexly shaped Chinese characters the Chinese script is rather 
difficult to learn. This dictionary tries to acknowledge that and offers a wide 
set of features including quick ways to find characters you don't know how to 
input.

Implementation

Eclectus heavily builds on cjklib, a Python-based library for handling Chinese 
characters I only announced last week [3]. While the library matures, Eclectus 
will at the same time grow in functions and data.

While currently mostly only Chinese features are being implemented, the goal 
is to  provide the same level of features for Japanese and for other languages 
relying on Chinese characters.

The dictionary currently relies on KDE-bindings, which for now limits its use 
to Linux. One future goal is to provide the same functionalities under a pure 
Qt foundation, and then making Eclectus available on Windows and Mac OS X.

Try it out

You are welcome to give Eclectus a try and join as a user or even a developer 
to make this dictionary the best out there. Checkout svn or use the snapshot 
packages available for download. Please note the list of current shortcomings 
[4], which you may take as a starting point to get involved  yourself :)

Now the mandatory warning for early adaptors: Eclectus is still in an early 
development stage, expect errors and sparse data.

Tell me what you think

Christoph

[1] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwDeUSkQugU
[3] http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uyhc/en/content/announcing-cjklib
[4] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/issues/list