circius / wiktionary-to-kindle

Converts a set of Wiktionary entries to a .mobi dictionary usable by a Kindle.

wiktionary-to-kindle

Converts a set of Wiktionary entries to a .mobi dictionary usable by a Kindle.

How it works

1. A Wiktionary dump is downloaded.
2. JWKTL is used to parse the downloaded XML and to create a database of the results.
3. Some Java code iterates on the wanted entries and generates a text file in which each line has the following format: word<TAB>definition.
4. tab2opf is used to convert the text file into a set of OPF and HTML files.
5. KindleGen is used to convert the above OPF and HTML files to a MOBI eBook that can be used as a dictionary by a Kindle.

Generated dictionary files

• English-English, 96MB
• French-English, 27MB
• Greek-English, 6MB

Getting it to work

1. Clone the repo as well as its submodule.

git clone https://github.com/nyg/wiktionary-to-kindle.git
git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Build the Java project. Apache Maven is required.

mvn package

3. Download the latest English Wiktionary dump. In the following command, the en and latest arguments are the defaults so they are not needed. Note that the specified language should be parsable by JWKTL (currently it only supports en, de, ru). To specify another date use the YYYYMMDD format. The dump downloaded is pages-articles.xml.bz2.

java -jar target/wiktionary-to-kindle-1.0.0.jar download en latest

4. The dump must now be parsed using the following command (as mentioned above, en and latest are not needed).

java -jar target/wiktionary-to-kindle-1.0.0.jar parse en latest

5. Time has now come to generate the dictionary text file. As said before, the default language is en but here it is possible to select only the entries of a particular language. For example, if we want only the Greek entries (el) of the English Wiktionary, the following command is to be used:

java -jar target/wiktionary-to-kindle-1.0.0.jar generate el

6. The dictionary file has been generated in dictionaries/lexicon.txt. To convert it into an OPF file, execute the commands below. Python 3 is required. The -s and -t options are the source and target languages respectively.

cd dictionaries
python ../scripts/tab2opf/tab2opf.py -s el -t en lexicon.txt

7. Convert the OPF file into a MOBI eBook using KindleGen. Replace by either linux, mac or win. On Windows, the name of the executable is kindlegen.exe.

../scripts/kindlegen_<OS>/kindlegen lexicon.opf

8. If all went well, you should now have the lexicon.mobi file in your possession. You can either send it to your Kindle via its Kindle email address, or drag and drop it as you would with another eBook.

What needs working

1. Improving JWKTL's parsing abilities (template support, etc.).
2. Finding how to properly structure the OPF entries.

Screenshots