No longer maintained
Note that I give up maintaining this project. If you want to take it over, contact me at my sf.net mail address.
PalmOpenDic is a PalmOS dictionary application for PalmOS 3.5 or higher. It can be used to view (and search in) dictionaries which are stored in compressed form on your Palm Storage Memory or on an expansion card.
The whole application requires about 16K of storage memory, excluding dictionaries, of course. On most Palm devices you will as well need SysZLib (which will need about 30 K extra space). Most users will already have it.
Dictionaries may include up to 15 languages (although 2 languages is the most common case) and can be hundreds of megabytes large. You can search for words in each language; PalmOpenDic will show you all the phrases that contain this word in this language. It features command bar integration (which can be turned off if you prefer) and can be used as a target for the Plucker Plugin Interface. The dictionary files are not as compressed as pzdbView's files, but support a much faster search due to the built-in word indexes.
The UI does not have many features; selecting languages, searching for words, scrolling, showing translations and selecting/deleting dictionaries is everything you get. It can optionally search for the current clipboard content if you prefer that.
The dictionary format is a bit more complicated than the pzdbView database format. It is much harder to create than to parse (due to the indexes needed). There is a Java based converter available (that does not support all features of the database format yet), and a cmd file for converting dict.cc dictionaries.
If you use a device with PalmOS 5.0 or higher, you can speed up building the results dramatically if you use the ARM optimized version of SysZlib instead of the 68k version. Both are shipped with pzdbview.
PalmOpenDic 1.0 (107 KB)
PalmOpenDic Source code (71 KB)
Third-party dictionaries from Apertium Tinylex
prc-tools are used to compile PalmOpenDic. Patches are always welcome (especially those that speed up the program without causing any other overhead); if you add special features that increase the file size significantly (or that slow down the program significantly), please #ifdef them so that it is still possible to get a version without them.