Mittwoch, 16. September 2009

Automatic BOMP import

Disclaimer: This Blog post is probably only interesting if you want to use simon for the German language.

If you do, then you most likely already know the problem with the BOMP dictionary. It is a great quality, huge dictionary that even contains terminal information. In short: It is the best shadow dictionary for simon there is - and I am not saying the best for the German language; it's the best. Period.

Only problem: The licence. It doesn't permit free distribution. Instead, you had to send an e-Mail to a specific address at the university of Bonn and wait for a reply that contained the dictionary as attachment. This process could take a couple of days.

So we contacted the team that is holding the copyright and they permitted us an exception in the licence. We are now allowed to distribute the dictionary to our users ourselves as long as we still gather their name and e-Mail addresses (for statistic purposes) and they still have to accept the BOMP licence terms. So we integrated this process directly into simon. When selecting to import a HADIFIX dictionary you can now select to manually specify a file or to download and import the HADIFIX BOMP automatically.