Hello, some months I ago I finished this project http://lexica.linguax.com/ ( http://www.linguax.com/lexica ) (has been edited 28.1.2014) where I pretty much make from PDF Latin dictionaries (such as a scanned version of Forcellini: Lexicon Totius Latinitatis) a version where you can search by typing on your keyboard: after writing a word, the page the word is in appears.
It is better than having some low quality OCR (an automatic transcription) and also better than to have just a PDF you cannot really search in - a compromise.
There are also some Latin-Greek and Greek-Latin dictionaries (ancient Greek). And I’m planning to add more.
I really like your solution to making these texts accessible. Indexing the pages is an elegant way to make the text available when it’s impossible to OCR and is far too much to reasonably transcribe.
I must admit that it wasn’t originally my idea and some (maybe a bit complicated) pdf-reader based solution existed, but I’m the author of this implementation
The second word I searched for was ‘necopinatus’ (unexpected, unforeseen). Only Forcellini had that one. Whitaker’s Words has it too. It suddenly struck me: why not add Whitaker’s Words to the top left-hand corner? Then we’d have a parser as well. Just a thought.
Interesting idea about the Whitaker… my problem is the space if I want to keep the page clean. By that I mean that I don’t want to face the problem that a considerable part of the page is just “this text spam” and not the relevant information searched. Right now it is quite usable even on 1024*768 (I don’t recommend any lower resolution and if you use a mobile phone browser… well, you’ll have to deal with it somehow I access it sometimes (not often) on my phone, so I know).
I’m thinking about more dictionaries, but mostly I’m afraid that the public won’t see the results as most of the dictionaries I have in mind or are already processed, are still copyrighted, therefore not available. (but I would rather use a PM for this kind of conversation)
I am sorry for the website not running today. Nothing wrong on my side: the site appears to be in the best shape (from its control panel), but in the reality the server is not responding. I am trying to contact the provider, but it seems that they have cut support for free-users… but I am trying nevertheless.
I also may come to some other permanent solutions…
(Linguax,acis is a rare adjective used once by Gellius meaning the same as loquax,acis ← but that was unfortunately taken together with most of Latin words in their canonical form ← and it is short)
It will cost me around 82 USD / year (the domain and the hosting) so I will be glad for any donation. There is a donation bar in the dictionaries (it will disappear once it is filled) for the next year costs. (this year has been pretty much all payed by one generous donor, even though very many few donated).
In the case I couldn’t keep it running solely on donations, I might think of advertisements… or some other annoying solutions.
The users from the old address will get redirected.
The server is now situated in Netherlands (the old is/was in Pennsylvania), so the users from Europe (as myself) might be happier now. But it should be faster in total, so all users, no matter the place, should get the pages faster (unless they have naturally a very slow Internet connection… but even with that maybe).
(I simultaneously moved my older project to http://www.linguax.com in case you wondered why the “/lexica” is there)
I came across your website and I liked it so much! You have done a wonderful job! The only “problem” I see is that it requires internet access.
I would love to create a desktop application to be able to use the dictionaries offline. In order to do this I would need to recreate the database in my computer, which implies going through every single page and notating the top-left word of it. Since this is a lot of work, I want to ask you if you would be willing to send me this information (the word index database). For the images I can write a script to download them automatically, so that is not a big problem.
Please post here your answer or send me an email to aochagavia92 [at] gmail [dot] com
Since today you can use simply http://lexica.linguax.com (the old one will work nevertheless http://linguax.com/lexica ← it links to the same place).
Maybe some day I will rearrange my projects and use the main domain for the dictionary http://linguax.com which now hosts an older project of mine.
aochagavia: Downloading the images directly from the website would be a problem since there is some traffic which costs something (please do not attempt it) But we would find a way. I may contact you in the future, once I have more time
thesaurus: I’m glad you like it. Actually there might be soon a purely digital version You will hear more from me about it.
mirum dictionarium est! I’ve never heard of this dictionary before, but this is much more in-depth than the Bantam and Cassell’s that own (which are both excellent). It looks like Bolchazy-Carducci has reprinted it and the Amazon reviews are good. This will have to be added to my wishlist!