[JGloss] I'd like to take a crack at adding word-frequency support to the source. Any hints?

[George M. <sar...@gm...>]

Despite it's age this program still seems to be the best at what it does. I
think only Wakan offers similar functionality, though not nearly as well.
Many thanks Mr. Koch. :-)

I've been using it with Bullwhip PDF printer to output fully annotated
Aozora PDF's to my Kindle, which has been an INCREDIBLE boon to my reading
of difficult texts. For a better reading experience I've had to meddled
around with Edict a little, eliminating superfluous entries and parentheses,
as well as facilitating tategaki-style pages with a rotated version of MS
Mincho (as well as  dummy versions of Mincho and Arial for annotation-free
pages interspersed between the annotated ones)

It'd be ideal to implement a lot of this additional functionality in code --
ie. allowing access to the @ fonts to obviate the need for custom tategaki
fonts, exporting to PDF with proper page breaks via itextsharp or a similar
library, an option to hide the annotations without changing the line spacing
-- but I doubt I'd be the man to do it, as I'm still very much a beginner in
Java.

The one thing I WOULD like to take a crack at changing is the way JGloss
chooses its translations. I'm using ChaSen and EDICT.. Two syllable words
not written in kanji in the text are invariably wrong (ie. "tachi,"
amusingly, ends up as "the dominant partner in a homosexual relationship,"
rather than "group" for instance). The jjdx index orders everything in
alphabetical order, and seems to simply choose the first reading, katakana
first.

Incidentally, I've managed to find a frequency-ordered version of Edict
packaged with a program called cbjisho in sqlite format, which I then
converted to a plain text Edict-formatted dictionary, if that couldt help.
Unfortunately the index-building classes seem to quicksort any indexes based
on it back into submission. Telling FileBasedDictionary.class not to
quicksort, predictably, simply messed things up.

Any suggestions?

-George