FinVoc - a dictionary Finnish to English
Overview
This program was written to assist in reading finnish language books. It
contains quite a lot of words (right now about 4000).
New words can be entered 'on the fly', which means that you have to
look them up in the dictionary only once.
Here is a screenshot:
Incremental search
Standard incremental search highlights all the words, that begin with the
wanted letters (see screen above). This is useful to find related or similar
words, also to reduce typing effort.
'Regexp' search
Additionally, the database can be restricted to entries that match a 'regular
expression' with the english and/or finnish word.
So-called 'Regular Expressions' are a standardized 'language' for defining
pattern matching.
For example, the regular expression 
matches all entries that contain the words 'earth', 'wind' or 'fire'. Additionally,
in the following screenshot, incremental search limits the highlighted
expressions to those, which start with 'pal' in the finnish part:
To refine the search, we could use 
instead. The \b requires a word boundary after 'wind' to get rid of the
'window'. Anyway, this example only scratches the surface of what can be
done with regular expressions.
Performance/Implementation
FinVoc is written in perl Tk. But don't laugh yet, it's quick enough. Also,
Perl Tk frequently surprises me by being stable when any decent program
should crash...
Although the algorithms are not too sophisticated, the program is pretty
fast: On my P I / 266 laptop, the response time in incremental search is
too short to notice. The Regexp-search from the example run through 4000
entries needs about a third of a second.
Only putting all the words into the listbox (at startup and when leaving
Regexp-search) requires two or three seconds.
Lack of features...
... is what I consider a feature in itself: You don't have to read the
manual to get most of the functionality, because it's so simple.
Manual
I wrote some lines on how to use it, which can be found in the 'About'-box.
(But you don't have to learn the 'regular expressions' language, it
is not necessary to use the program)
Database maintenance
Provided, that users send me a copy of their vocabulary file after entering
new words, I'll add the changes to the next release.
The database is ASCII, you can import it into your own 'perl'-programs
using three lines of code or a text editor.
License
It's free. Artistic license, same as 'perl'.
Download
You can download it here.
Please look at the version numbers and pick the highest one.
Requirements, Installation
FinVoc is developed under Linux, using perl 5.00503 and PerlTk 800.014.
Perl comes with your Linux/Unix distribution, and you can download the
latest PerlTk release from CPAN.ORG, or get it from your Linux CD set.
Installation:
Download the file finvoc_xx_tar.gz.
Then:
gunzip finvoc_xx_tar.gz
tar -xf finvoc_xx_tar
Start with
finvoc
Contact
You can contact me here. Please
*do* report bugs and errors!
There is a project
page on sourceforge.net with mailing list and lots of stuff.
This page is hosted at 