2. Installing Dictionaries
Before doing any searches, some dictionaries need to be installed. gWaei will automatically pop up the Preferences dialog to help you get started if it doesn't find any dictionaries in the ~/.waei directory. If you don't install any dictionaries then, closing the dialog will quit the entire applicaton.
2.1. Supported Dictionary Installs
In the Install Dictionaries tab, if you click one of the "Add" buttons, gWaei should install that dictionary from Jim Breen's WWWJDIC ftp site automatically, taking care of unzipping, converting the encoding, and post-processing the file. If you want to install a dictionary file manually, you will have to do these steps yourself.
If you are in a bind without an internet connection, it is still possible to install dictionaries through offline means. If you click the triangles for the dictionaries in the Preferences dialog, you can change the install source. Through this method, pre-downloaded local files on the hard drive are selectable.
2.2. Unsupported Dictionary Installs
If you want to install a non-supported dictionary like the German-Japanese dictionary made by the Wadoku Project, you will have to follow a procedure similar to below.
% wget ftp://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/edict.gz
% gunzip edict.gz
% iconv -f EUC-JP -t UTF-8 -o English edict
% mv English ~/.waei
The order that you install the unsupported dictionaries determines the order they appear in the list.
If you have a Kanji or Radicals dictionary of your own, you will probably want to name it as such with some kind of unique identifier. This will make gwaei use it's kanji search algolithms instead of it's general ones. For example, you could call it, "Kanji FR", "Kanji2".
 | Note: If you manually install dictionaries, gWaei can't do any post-processing on them in the normal fashion. There are ways to hack gWaei into creating a Mix dictionary, but this is not officially supported. When installing custom dictionaries, you will probably want to avoid the default names of the dictionaries, including English, Kanji, Radicals, Mix, Places and Names. |
Please contact one of the developers if you want more support for other dictionaries!