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Preferences Explanation

PostPosted: Sun Sep 11, 2011 11:49 pm
by chulai
Can someone explain me the meaning of these 2 options?

* "Other Programs. Use installed dictionaries from other dictionary programas if available". Exactly which are these other programs?
* "Middle match deepness". What exactly means and which is a good default value?

Thanks,

Chulai

Re: Preferences Explanation

PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2011 12:19 am
by ikm
  1. Right now those are ColorDict and Wordoholic dictionary paths. Their standard locations on sd card are added to the list of directories where to search for dictionaries. This list used to contain Fora dictionary as well, but turned out that they merely use dictd container to store arbitrary data, and hence it was removed from the list.
  2. This option is very hard to describe given very little space Android allows for the description. Basically, when you type a word in the search bar, you usually see all the words beginning from what you've typed. However, you may also want to see the matches inside phrases as well. I.e. when you search for 'word', a match for 'the word' could show up as well. The 'middle match deepness' option specifies the maximum position your target word can hold inside the phrase. So for the value of 0, when you search for a word 'word', you can only find it itself (and any words beginning with it, of course). But for the value of 1 (default one), you'll find both 'word' and 'the word'. For the value of 2, in addition to 'word' and 'the word', you will also be able to find 'the very word' (given that those phrases actually exist in your dictionaries, of course). And so on. The larger the value for this option, the more RAM is required for indexing, and indexes also become larger (they are stored on the SD card). The searches can also become somewhat slower (probably not so much). Note that the desktop version of GoldenDict just uses the 'infinity' for this value - it indexes all words in phrases. However, this approach is too expensive for mobile devices. One can opt-in using the 'infinity' value for this option, though :) My feeling is that larger values don't really provide a lot of benefit, so the default is 1, which is nice for typical English lookups where words may often be prefixed with articles. To make sure there's no confusion here, even with the value of 0 you will be able to find any phrase of any length - you'll just have to type it from its beginning. I.e. to find the phrase 'this is a phrase', you can type 'this is' and you'll see it there. But if you want to only type 'phrase' and have this phrase suggested as well - you'd need to set the value of the option to 3.