Dexonline is a collection of word definitions from various Romanian dictionaries (see also the note on Romanian dictionaries).
Dixit is a program which enables the local use of the dexonline database. It has been created by Octavian Procopiuc back in 2004. Dixit has been first written for Qt3. Qt3 is a version of the Qt toolkit. There is now a version for Qt4.
I will briefly describe the experience of the installation of the 2009 dixit on Fedora 10. You should be able to compile it on any platform on which Qt is available and you also have a C++ compiler.
First, read the dixit documentation (in Romanian).
Second, you have to download the dixit source. You have a choice between a qt4 and qt3 version. I have used a qt4 version.
Third, you have to extract from the archive the dixit folder. On Fedora, I start a command-line in the dixit folder. I have both qt3 and qt4. I use it for the following commands.
Check the version of qt4; Fedora is an rpm-based Linux distribution:
rpm -q qt-devel
In my case, it is qt-devel-4.4.3-2. This is actually qt4-devel. It is well above the minimal requirement: 4.2.0. I also have however qt3-devel-3.3.8b-17. This requires a bit of attention during compilation.
You may check in the same manner qdbm. You need at least the 1.8.77 version, but you have in the dixit source the files used during compilation.
Now, you have to create the Makefile. On my Fedora 10, I had to use the command
qmake-qt4
If I type just qmake, this will call Qt3. I wanted Qt4. I also have tested the compilation with the source for Qt3. It works. In my case, qmake invokes Qt3.
Then just type on the command-line
make
If the compilation goes well, you get the dixit binary file that you may call with:
./dixit
Then you need the database. You may download a database from the dixit project (this one is dated 2009-10-31). The dexonline database is updated when you first start dixit or when you update the database manually (Alt + A). The interface of dixit is self-explanatory. The name of the local database is dixit.qdb; you may have to repeat the updating procedure several times until you download the full database.
I have simply put dixit and dixit.qdb in a convenient “share” folder named dex. You may use a simple Bash script to start dixit.
There are also other convenient solutions for starting dixit. For example, under Gnome, you may create a launcher on a desktop panel. Or you may add an item to the Gnome menu. For example, create in ./.local/share/applications a dixit.desktop file:
The corresponding icon has to be placed in ./.local/share/icons. You have to edit the desktop file with a text editor. I use Vim.
Now, when you have installed dixit in a convenient way, it is easy to use it on the desktop. You can copy words from a text and search the corresponding entry with dixit. You can select and copy text fron the dixit window. There is a history of the searches on a panel of the dixit window (it does not appear in the screenshot below!). You can see next an image of the main panel of the dixit window.
The dexonline database evolved in time. The first format used a special notation for the Romanian letters with diacritical marks. For example,
cuno\stin\te
The s and the t with a dicritical mark are denoted by s and t preceded by a backslash. The new form of the database uses UTF-8. The differences between the databases are also generated by the different standards for Romanian letters with diacritics. 1 For Romanian diacritics see the site of Cristian Secară and the notes here on Romanian quotes and the Romanian keyboard. See also the ■ screenshot for the form of the diacritical marks.
Any program which implements an interface for dexonline has to follow the evolution of the database. That's why new dixit does not work with older versions of the dexonline database (the file with the qdb extension).
The new dixit - if it cannot find a dictionary entry in the database - offers a choice among several entries (not a list of dictionary articles as in the old version). This is a nice feature.
The older dexonline databases had links between entries. For example the 2004 database has links among entries. This implemented a philosophy of the search based upon a topical concordance. 2
The new version of dexonline uses a type of search inspired by the idea of verbal concordance. In the Internet version of dexonline there is the possibility to use http://dexonline.ro/search.php?cuv= with some word after the equal sign. The word is added with a click of the mouse.
It is possible to obtain a copy of the dexonline database in the SQL format.
1 I want to thank Mr.Tim Anghel for pointing these aspects to me (personal communication).
2 I want to thank again Mr.Tim Anghel who pointed out to me that contrast in the old and new types of searches in dexonline. The analogy is with biblical concordances; they are of two types: topical and verbal. The verbal concordance is an alphabetic list of words. The topical concordance is organized around keywords.