Support for BGL files

[lf-araujo]

ATM BGL files are not supported, are there any plans for that?

[dohliam]

Absolutely. I seem to recall the Babylon dictionary format is fairly straightforward, but when I recently tried to write a parser for BGL files it was hard to find any that were not in binary format. Not sure how to get around that (I would guess that most people with BGL dictionaries want to use them in binary form rather than making them from scratch themselves), but if you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them!

[lf-araujo]

Well, for instance, one can convert bgl files into other types. This project has this aim: https://github.com/ilius/pyglossary

[dohliam]

That's a great project, thanks for the link! So, the user would have to convert the BGL file to something else and then gdcl could read that other format? (I notice that pyglossary can read but not write DSL format.) Do you have a preference for a particular intermediary format in that case? If not, I could always just add support for plain text tab separated dictionaries and convert BGL to that.

[lf-araujo]

Well, in my case it doesn't really matter, as long as I can access them via command line. Look, I also found out that the developer left old files in his old sf account here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyglossary/?source=typ_redirect

This one has a little gui, that allows batch conversion. Do your script support txt or dic tabfiles? If so, that version already does the trick.

[dohliam]

No support yet for tabfiles, but it's a good idea and I can definitely add it.

In the meantime, you can always convert tabfiles etc to dsl pretty easily. You might find some of the scripts in the dsl-tools project helpful for that.

[lf-araujo]

Thanks, I will look into it!

[dohliam]

No progress on handling BGL files directly, but if they can be converted into tab separated files you should be able to use the tab2dsl utility to convert them to DSL format.

If you run into problems converting from tabs to dsl, let me know!