StarDict

Latest revision as of 05:17, 19 September 2020

StarDict is a program for reading language dictionaries (AKA glossaries), written by Hu Zheng. It was intended as a successor to StarDic. Its dictionary format consists of an info file with extension ".ifo", a data file with the extension ".dict" (commonly compressed with Dzip to become ".dict.dz"), an index file with extension ".idx", and a synonyms file with the extension ".syn". This is not to be confused with the Dictd format, also uses a data file with a ".dict" or ".dict.dz" extension, but has nothing else besides an index file, for which it uses the extension ".index" instead of ".idx".

The latest StarDict version, as of 2020, is from 2015.^[2]

[edit] Identification

.ifo files begin with either StarDict's treedict ifo file or StarDict's dict ifo file.^[3] The others do not seem to have anything that could serve as a definite identifier.

StarDict's .dict files can be distinguished from Dictd's by that only the latter are completely plaintext files.

[edit] Software

• StarDict itself
• GoldenDict, meant as a successor^[4]
• sdcv
• Babiloo
• LightLang
• stardict2odict, converter to ODict
• KTranslator

[edit] Sample Files

• "Big dictionaries" on the StarDict website
• Index of dictionary files on the old SourceForge site

[edit] Links

• Homepage
• Original SourceForge page
  • Message currently at that address, placed there in 2011^[5] after the project's page was taken down as a result of "copyright infringement reports"^{[note 1]}, imploring the reader to switch to a different program
• Page on Michael Beijer's translation site
• Wikipedia:StarDict

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ "[S]peculation" online being that this was the result of the program's downloads including copyrighted dictionaries (Wikipedia:Talk:StarDict#Copyright_Infringement_Complaints)

[edit] References

1. ↑ Changelog file ("ChangeLog"); "StarDict1.33+" apparently refers to StarDic
2. ↑ http://www.huzheng.org/stardict/
3. ↑ sdcv source → sec/stardict_lib.cpp → DictInfo::load_from_ifo_file
4. ↑ http://stardict.sourceforge.net/
5. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20110724080059/http://stardict.sourceforge.net/