ViZiD / SilverDict

Web-Based Alternative to GoldenDict

SilverDict – Web-Based Alternative to GoldenDict

Documentation and Guides (Please read at least the general notes before using. There are some important notices.)

This project is intended to be a modern, from-the-ground-up, maintainable alternative to GoldenDict(-ng), developed with Flask and React.

You can access the live demo here (library management and settings are disabled). It is hosted by a free service so please bear with its slowness. Demo last updated on 13th February 2024.

Screenshots

The dark theme is not built in, but rendered with the Dark Reader Firefox extension.

Features

• Python-powered
• Cleaner code
• Deployable both locally and on a self-hosted server
• Fast enough
• Modern, clean and sleek web interface, with Material Design
• Works as expected
• DSL, StarDict, MDict supported
• Anki mode
• Full-text search (available on Unix systems only)
• Cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, limited iOS)

Roadmap

• Linux: RPM/Deb packaging
• ?? Publish on PyPI
• Windows: package everything into a single click-to-run executable (help wanted)

Server-side

• Add support for Babylon BGL glossary format¹
• Inline styles to prevent them from being applied to the whole page (The commented-out implementation in server/app/dicts/mdict/html_cleaner.py breaks richly-formatted dictionaries.)²
• Transliteration for the Cyrillic³, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Devanagari scripts (done: Greek, one-way Arabic, though only Arabic itself is supported at the moment, if you'd like to help with Farsi, Urdu, etc., please open an issue)
• Add the ability to set sources for automatic indexing, i.e. dictionaries put into the specified directories will be automatically added
• Recursive source scanning
• Lock list operations to prepare for no-GIL python

Client-side

• Localisation
• A real mobile app
• A C++/Qt (or QML) desktop app⁴

Usage

Dependencies

This project utilises some Python 3.10 features, such as the match syntax, and a minimal set of dependencies:

PyYAML # configuration files
Flask # the web framework
Flask-Cors
waitress # the WSGI server
python-idzip # for dictzip
python-lzo # for v1/v2 MDict
xxhash # for v3 MDict
dsl2html # for DSL
xdxf2html # for XDXF-formatted StarDicts
requests # for auto-update

The packages dsl2html and xdxf2html are mine, and could potentially be used by other projects.

In order to enable the feature of morphology analysis, you need to place the Hunspell dictionaries into ~/.silverdict/hunspell, and install the Python package sibel or hunspell. I developed sibel as a faster alternative to PyHunspell. But it could be tricky to install (see its Readme). As a side note, if your program also uses PyHunspell, try out Sibel, which I guarantee is much sweeter than the Hun.

In order to enable the feature of Chinese conversion, you need to install the Python package opencc.

To use full-text search, please install xapian, optionally also lxml.

Note about the non pure Python dependencies

python-lzo, xxhash, dsl2html, xdxf2html all have pure Python alternatives, but they are either much slower or not very robust. If you are unable to install python-lzo or dsl2html, no action is needed. For xxhash, please install the pure Python implementation ppxxh instead. For xdxf2html, install lxml, which is not pure Python either, but its binary wheels are available for most platforms.

Local Deployment

The simplest method to use this app is to run it locally.

cd client
yarn install
yarn build
mv build ../server/

And then:

cd ../server
pip install -r requirements.txt
python server.py # working-directory-agnostic

Then access it at localhost:2628.

Or, if you do not wish to build the web app yourself or clone the whole repository, you can download from release a zip archive, which contains everything you need to run SilverDict.

For Windows users: A zip archive complete with a Python interpreter and all the dependencies (except for Xapian) is available in release. Download the archive, unzip it, and double-click setup.bat to generate a shortcut. Then you can move it wherever you wish and click on it to run SilverDict. After launching the server, you can access it at localhost:2628.

For Termux users: run the bash script termux_setup.sh in the top-level directory, which will install all the dependencies, including PyHunspell. The script assumes you have enabled external storage access and will create a default source directory at /sdcard/Documents/Dictionaries.

Alternatively, you could use dedicated HTTP servers such as nginx to serve the static files and proxy API requests. Check out the sample config for more information.

Server Deployment

I recommend nginx if you plan to deploy SilverDict to a server. Run yarn build to generate the static files of the web app, or download a prebuilt one from release (inside server/build), and then place them into whatever directory where nginx looks for static files. Remember to reverse-proxy all API requests and permit methods other than GET and POST.

Assuming your distribution uses systemd, you can refer to the provided sample systemd config and run the script as a service.

Docker Deployment

Docker is not recommended as you have to tuck in all your dictionary and, highly fragmented data files, which is not very practical. It is fine if you only run SilverDict locally, though.

Contributing

• Start with an item in the roadmap, or open an issue to discuss your ideas. Please notify me if you are working on something to avoid duplicated efforts. I myself dislike enforcing a coding style, but please use descriptive, verbose variable names and UTF-8 encoding, LF line endings, and indent with tabs.
• Help me with the transliteration feature.
• Translate the guides into your language. You could edit them directly on GitHub.
• Translate the web UI on Crowdin. Please open an issue or send me a PM on Crowdin if your language's not there.

Credits

The favicon is the icon for 'Dictionary' from the Papirus icon theme, licensed under GPLv3.

This project uses or has adapted code from the following projects:

Name	Developer	Licence
mdict-analysis	Xiaoqiang Wang	GPLv3
mdict-query	mmjang	No licence
python-stardict	Su Xing	GPLv3
dictionary-db (together with the $n$-gram method)	Jean-François Dockes	GPL 2.1
pyglossary	Saeed Rasooli	GPLv3

I would also express my gratitude to Jiang Qian for his suggestions, encouragement and great help.

Similar projects

• flask-mdict (MDict only, pure Python)
• GoldenDict-ng's proposed HTTP server (stuck at the moment)
• Lectus (DSL only, in Perl)
• django-mdict (MDict only, very fast)
• An ancient issue of GoldenDict

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Footnotes

1. GoldenDict stores the decoded entries and full-text definitions in its custom index. I see no reason why I should follow suit when one can always convert dictionaries in this obnoxious format into HTML-formatted StarDict with the excellent pyglossary. ↩

2. The use of a custom styling manager such as Dark Reader is recommended until I fix this, as styles for different dictionaries interfere with each other. Or better, if you know CSS, you could just edit the dictionaries' stylesheets to make them less intrusive and individualistic. ↩

3. A Russian-speaking friend told me that it is unusual to type Russian on an American keyboard, so whether this feature is useful is open to doubt. ↩

4. I have come up with a name: Kilvert (yeah, after the Welsh priest for its close resemblance to SilverDict, and the initial letter, of course, stands for KDE). (I'm on Xfce by the way.) ↩