Rescue KDing (or similar) as offline dictionary
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Description

As German native speaker and user and developer in a English speaking community, I very much like to have an dictionary. It should be offline because to look up simple words I don't need to use the Internet and it is better for privacy.

Until recently, I used KDing (https://en.opensuse.org/KDing) which is fast, has got a fairly good English/German word list and provides an easy way to set a global keyboard shortcut to open the dictionary. Since it is KDE4-based and not maintained, it does not work properly anymore.

Ideally, I would like Plasma to offer easy access to an offline dictionary (read: the best currently available offline dictionary). The "easy" should be so easy that Plasma users do not consider Google Translate anymore for simple translation tasks.

gregormi created this task.Mar 24 2019, 7:18 PM
gregormi triaged this task as Normal priority.
knauss removed a parent task: T7050: Privacy Software.
knauss removed subscribers: sebas, bshah, ngraham and 25 others.

We track the Pricavy Goal in the KDE Privacy Goal project

Maybe a thing Plasma wants to look at.

gregormi updated the task description. (Show Details)Mar 24 2019, 8:37 PM
apol added a subscriber: apol.Mar 24 2019, 10:55 PM

Looks like the official website is down, you just linked the opensuse packaging there.
Do you know where we can find the source code?

@dkardarakos has been working on this app: https://gitlab.com/dimkard/glosbit
Not offline, but maybe can be used as a base

There is Qdacco, a offline catalan-english-catalan dictionary https://github.com/cpina/qdacco

A general solution could be a front-end for https://github.com/apertium

gregormi added a comment.EditedMar 25 2019, 9:54 PM
In T10719#180305, @apol wrote:

Do you know where we can find the source code?

I already tried to contact the author about two years ago; no success. Here is the source code for version 0.6 on the openSUSE build service: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/Education/kding. You have to log in to access the tar file. Here it is:

@IlyaBizyaev , @maspons: Thanks for those links. I didn't know these software and services.

Was KDing only German <-> English?

There was KDict, but it seems to disappear after KDE3.

Personally I use https://github.com/goldendict/goldendict/. It's Qt-based and supports many dictionary formats.

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