Rikaixul -- The Rikai plugin to Mozilla
(note: this article is out of date. Please see http://rikaixul.mozdev.org/installation.html for the latest version)
Excited by XUL, I started to write a mozilla browser plugin to do what rikai does. The project is archived at the mozdev rikaixul, but I gave up on it after a while (and having a kid). It is functional, and in some ways better than the web-page (more below).
Well, I'm happy to report that much of the code lives on in Moji, which is very close to being what I was trying to do. It includes all the dictionary and lookup code, even cleaned up a bit. But for some reason, Erwin (the maintainer) has never plugged in my mouseover code from rikaixul. All that needs to be done is to have a button which goes through the DOM of the main document and adds javascript callbacks to show that kanji and/or look up words from that location (just put the next 10 chars as an argument into the callback--since it's all local, the size of the doc isn't a big deal).
All the dictionary/word lookup code is there in rikaixul for the taking. This actually works better than Rikai, because I just try to look up words from whereever you point the mouse. I.e., rikaixul made no attempt to segment the Japanese. I found this actually made it easier to use because I can always parse things better than any automated method, and so didn't as often get hung up on bad segmentation.
Anyway, from time to time people ask how they can help. I really hope someone will pick this up and add mouseover functionality to moji (though I guess then mozilla users would never use this site, eh?).
Excited by XUL, I started to write a mozilla browser plugin to do what rikai does. The project is archived at the mozdev rikaixul, but I gave up on it after a while (and having a kid). It is functional, and in some ways better than the web-page (more below).
Well, I'm happy to report that much of the code lives on in Moji, which is very close to being what I was trying to do. It includes all the dictionary and lookup code, even cleaned up a bit. But for some reason, Erwin (the maintainer) has never plugged in my mouseover code from rikaixul. All that needs to be done is to have a button which goes through the DOM of the main document and adds javascript callbacks to show that kanji and/or look up words from that location (just put the next 10 chars as an argument into the callback--since it's all local, the size of the doc isn't a big deal).
All the dictionary/word lookup code is there in rikaixul for the taking. This actually works better than Rikai, because I just try to look up words from whereever you point the mouse. I.e., rikaixul made no attempt to segment the Japanese. I found this actually made it easier to use because I can always parse things better than any automated method, and so didn't as often get hung up on bad segmentation.
Anyway, from time to time people ask how they can help. I really hope someone will pick this up and add mouseover functionality to moji (though I guess then mozilla users would never use this site, eh?).
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