Re: [tlug] Using JDIC from inside a text editor

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "jw" == jeraldweinstein  <jeraldweinstein@example.com> writes:

    jw> By emulating JWP I meant all the user had to do to check on
    jw> the dictionary meaning of a word was a two step process of
    jw> highliting the hiragana/kanji and then pressing a function key
    jw> (F6) and the dictionary would open up immediately inside of
    jw> the editor with a myriad of EDICT meanings.

Emacs has had it since 1993 or thereabouts: edict.el.  Eiwa can be
even easier than that---if point is already in the word, it's one
keystroke.  Emacs will find the word for you.  Waei has the feature,
but Japanese morphosyntax is so hard that it only gets it right about
half the time.

I never was totally satisfied with the UI, for one thing although I
did create a dictionary lookup mode, I never got around to stealing a
mouse click so that dictionary lookup was point and click.  Also,
though the morphosyntax is complex, I bet I could get up to 90% or
better with heuristics, and Emacs now has at least three parser
generators available which might help (although all of them are of the
usual "parse the whole thing from the beginning" type, so one would
probably have to hack hard to parse _outward_ from point).

The fact that automagic hypertext hasn't been made part of all text
widgets by now (I mean, when you get right down to it, an Emacs window
is just a text widget) is really disappointing to me.  Even in Emacs
you have to explicitly require the thing-at-point library, but once
you've done that you just bind "(my-cool-function (word-at-point))" to
a user gesture and "my-cool-function" is now available as a hyperlink.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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