]> Emmanuele Bassi

ebassi@gnome.org

2005 Emmanuele Bassi This manual documents the &version; release of the Dictionary Library for MATE 2.x The MATE Dictionary Library is a simple yet powerful collection of classes that can be used to access various dictionary sources. It was created for the MATE Dictionary application, but it has been made available for each developer whom wishes to access and display definitions stored inside language dictionaries. A dictionary context is a representation of a transport method, that is a way to access a dictionary source. A dictionary source is any digital representation of a language dictionary which provides a way to programmatically query its contents for the available definitions of a word, phrase or any kind of text. A dictionary source might use files encoded using the DICT or the StarDict formats, and offer an interface for queries compliant to the Dictionary Protocol as defined by the RFC 2229. The only context implementation currently available is a client for the Dictionary Protocol. A dictionary source is repesented using a specially crafted file, and can be accessed using the GdictSource class. Dictionary sources can be created at runtime or stored inside a file and loaded directly using its path. Usually, sources files are stored inside a predefined path and loaded using the GdictSourceLoader class. Apart from the low-level classes, the MATE Dictionary library offers a set of widgets for accessing the dictionary sources and showing the results of queries.