Project completed in July 2020. A dictionary was produced with Kindle Previewer (free Amazon software). It was successfully tested on a few words. Then real life took over. I hope to come back to this project to polish it, some day.
The code has not been optimized. Most of it was written over two days without prior thoughts, refactored for another two days, polished a little in my spare time since. Much of the code does little more than help debug a few key functions used to create look-up references.
Python code to edit an ebook dictionary into a Kindle lookup dictionary that may be associated with the Catalan language. The source files may then be used to rebuild a dictionary.
Reader: Kindle Paperwhite 2018 aka Paperwhite 4 (Lookup dictionaries are not supported by all Kindles).
Source: Gran Diccionari de la llengua catalana (Kindle Edition). Available for purchase at https://www.amazon.com/Gran-Diccionari-Llengua-Catalana-Catalan-ebook/dp/B00DZWFUG4/ for less than 10 U.S. dollars. A free sample may be requested from amazon. This ebook does not support lookup (it is not listed as a dictionary under the Catalan language). The source was purchased in April 2020 and delivered in mobi format. The mobi file was converted to the azw format with calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/). The azw file was broken into several components using the KindleUnpack plugin (https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KindleUnpack).
Software:
-
Python is free sofware available for most operating systems: https://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/.
-
BeautifulSoup is a free Python library: https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/
-
KindleGen is free software freely provided by Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765211.
You must be able to run Python 3 code and the BeautifulSoup library. As the files to be processed are large and the content proprietary, online emulators may not be the appropriate tool. You must have a copy of the dictionary. A free sample may be found inside the GDLC directory.
Python: Make sure you have the appropriate parser libraries installed, e.g. the lxml parser. Examples: pip install lxml # general purpose package manager brew install html.parser # popular for MacOS conda install html5lib # Anaconda environment manager
File an issue and let's see if I can help. Let me know if you can contribute. Do you already have a Catalan Lookup dictionary? Let me know! You're looking for one? Let me know.
My original plan was to make a lookup dictionary for Aranes and Occitan. I started with Catalan because I happen to own an electronic copy of the dictionary.
Suggestions for improvement welcome!
@author: Patrick Toche.
