Dictionary Suggestion

[james]

Mike,
I mentioned this to you a while back, but I think it's worth bringing up again. As you persue new dictionaries to license, I strongly recommend you talk to 中国中医药出版社 (北京) about licensing their powerhouse Chinese-English Word Ocean 汉英大辞海. It is a very substantial 5,000 page, 2 volume set that goes far beyond Chinese and western medicine to include technical words for finance, science, business, trade, manufacturing, art, religion ... you name it. And it is the most complete source of idioms 成语 I have ever found. I use it constantly for the many terms not included in the Oxford and CE Dictionaries. It seems to have everything.
James

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the suggestion. However, there's a serious problem with licensing dictionaries like Cihai: fonts. A lot of the characters in Cihai, Hanyu Da Zidian, et al are not part of the standard Unicode Chinese character block which we use in PlecoDict. Many of those characters do fall in the "Extension A" or "Extension B" Unicode blocks, but as far as I know nobody has produced a PDA-friendly bitmap font for those blocks yet (and even if they did it would likely be prohibitively expensive to license), and there are likely some characters that fall even outside of those. I don't know what kind of format the Cihai data files are stored in, but even in the best-case scenario (that they used current Unicode 3.2 or 4.0 encoding for even their very obscure characters) there would still be a lot of characters that we wouldn't be able to display.

Now there are Unicode Extension A/B outline fonts available, and those would be pretty usable on a Pocket PC with ClearType (and very usable with a VGA screen) - I'm not 100% sure what the royalties for them would be, but based on our experience licensing SimSun and MingLiU I can't imagine they'd be prohibitively expensive. So we might look into licensing a super-large dictionary like Cihai or Hanyu Da Zidian in a year or so once we've gone through a few more software revisions. Hopefully by then there will also be Palm OS Cobalt devices available with their own outline font support.