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Word Inspector (wordinspect 0.1)
Copyright (c) 1998 Scott W. Gifford <sgifford@tir.com>
====================================================================
Word Inspector is a graphical front-end to the "dict" program. The
dict program allows you to search through one or more dictionary-like
reference books for a word, then displays its definition. Word
Inspector expands that by allowing you to enter words to look up more
easily, easily look up words that appear in the definition for another
word, and automatically look up a word in the X Windows selection.
It was written by Scott Gifford.
Word Inspector uses the GTK+ library (http://www.gtk.org/) for its
user interface, and was built with the Glade interface builder
(http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~damon/builder/index.html).
====================================================================
Getting it
====================================================================
You can download the latest version of Word Inspector from its
homepage, at:
http://www.tir.com/~sgifford/wordinspect/
====================================================================
Release Notes
====================================================================
See the file NEWS, included with this distribution.
====================================================================
Requirements
====================================================================
GTK 1.0.0 or greater (http://www.gtk.org/). Note that Word Inspector
was written and tested with GTK 1.0.5; it may or may not work
correctly with other versions. GTK 1.0.5 contains numerous bugfixes
and improvements, so you should probably download it and install
it anyways.
A copy of the dictd distribution (http://www.dict.org/).
Tested with version 1.4.9.
The address of a dictionary server. Dict, and therefore Word
Inspector, requires a dictionary server. You can use one of several
available for use on the Internet (documented in the dictd
distribution), or run your own (which is fairly easy, and allows you
to use your dictionary when you are not connected to the Internet).
This is included in the dictd distribution.
A reasonable compiler and C library.
Tested on RedHat Linux 5.0.
====================================================================
Using it
====================================================================
Please install a copy of dict (see above) and make sure it works and
is in installed in your path before installing Word Inspector.
Once you have done that, you should be able to install Word Inspector
it with the usual
./configure
make
make install
described (generically) in INSTALL. You may get a couple warnings
about unused functions; these are left over from the beta version of
Glade I used to develop.
Most configuration of Word Inspector is currently done by configuring
dict. See the documentation accompanying that package for more
information. I hope to include a GUI configuration tool in a future
version.
If you're not the reading type, at this point you can run
wordinspect
to see the GUI (try button 3), and
wordinspect --help
to see what command-line options you have, then skip to the end of
this section to see some interesting things you can do.
Once you have installed it (presumably into your PATH), you can run it
by typing "wordinspect." Of course, you may find it more convenient
to add it to your X Windows menu (or however you like to launch
programs). This will bring up a the "Word Finder" window, which
allows you to enter a word to look up. Simply enter the word you want
to look up, and hit Enter or the "Search" button. Word Inspector will
pause while it looks up the word, then pop up a new window with the
definition if it could find it, or some suggestions if it couldn't.
If it can't find anything that even resembles the word you entered, it
will display a window letting you know that, too.
In any Word Inspector window, you can right-click (button 3) on a word
to get a menu of various ways to get more information on that word.
Currently, the two choices are to define the word (look it up
directly), or search for it (pop up a search window with that word
entered in it). If you want to look up a multi-word phrase, select
the phrase with the button 1, as if you were going to paste it into
another window, then right-click on the selection to see the same menu
for the entire phrase. Spaces, newlines, and punctuation are
automatically removed from your selection, to help dict find it.
Of course, you can copy any information you'd like from the Word
Inspector window for pasting into other applications. Like in most X
applications, hilighting the words with the button 1 makes it the
primary selection, and you don't have to hit anything to paste it into
another application.
When you are finished reading the definition for a word, click on the
"OK" button at the bottom to get rid of the window. If you searched
for a word, you can search for another one by just replacing the word
you typed and hitting Enter or Search again. Word Inspector won't
exit until you have closed all of its windows, so you can close
anything (including Word Finder windows) at any time.
You can also pass various options to wordinspect on the command-line.
A few useful ones are:
--help: Display all options available for wordinspect.
--version: Display wordinspect's current version and copyright.
--search: Search for the word provided on the command line
[Default].
--define: Define the word provided on the command line.
--clipboard: Use the word currently in X's primary selection (the
clipboard) as if it were typed on the command line.
Useful for launching from a menu or hot-key.
--dict=/path/to/dict: Use the copy of dict in /path/to/dict.
My favorite way to use Word Inspector is to include a menu item on my
WindowMaker desktop that runs:
wordinspect --define --clipboard
, one for
wordinspect --search --clipboard
, and one that just runs
wordinspect
. This lets me hilight a word in Netscape, an xterm, Emacs, or any
other application, and then just click on my desktop menu to look it
up. If I could figure out how to get hotkeys to work, that would be
even cooler . . . :-)
====================================================================
Copyright
====================================================================
Word Inspector is copyrighted by Scott Gifford and is licensed through
the GNU General Public License. Read the COPYING file for the complete
license.
====================================================================
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