User's Guide

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User's Guide

Before you run the executable file dict check whether files english_russian.wb and russian_english.wb are in your current directory (e.g. ls *.wb). If they are not, you should cd to appropriate directory and run dict from there.

The first thing you will see when you run the dictionary is the main window. You can select English - Russian or Russian - English dictionary by clicking the appropriate button. This will launch new window with chosen dictionary. Meanwhile the main window will be inactive (buttons will not react to clicks). At current version you can't run both dictionaries at the same time.

Clicking the Quit button will quit the dictionary program.

The usage of the dictionary is very simple. All you have to do is simply to type the word into the input field. Whenever the contents of this input is changed, the searching algorithm tries to find the first entry in the dictionary which begins with the entered text. If no such entry can be found the last character is ommited, the algorithm is run again and so on till one entry matches the "pruned" text in the input field. The "best" hit is displayed in the 5th row, so there are four entries displayed above the "best" hit and five below it. You can also move over the dictionary by clicking buttons on the right side. Those with single arrow will move up/down one entry and those with double arrow will move up or down 10 entries. Clicking the Done button will quit this dictionary and return to the main window.

More or less everything mentioned at the English - Russian dictionary is also valid at the Russian - English dictionary. If your keyboard doesn't support Cyrillic encodings, you may simply enter Russian characters by clicking buttons below the input field. The program also supports Russian keyboard maps with three main Cyrillic encodings: ISO 8859-5, KOI-8 or Windows 1251. You only have to set the choice in the upper right corner appropriately. It is strongly recommended to use the keyboard map with ISO 8859-5 encoding if you can because the dictionary will work faster. Use the other two encodings only if you have to because of other programs. Do not type latin characters 'a', 'e' and 'o'! It's true they look the same as their Cyrillic counterparts but their numeric codes are different regardless of character set. See the Keyboards section for more info, how to obtain a Russian keyboard map.

Missing "dotted E" (Ё)

The dictionary does support the "dotted e" (ё) - pronounced as 'yo'. Unfortunately this character is not used in the dictionary files. It is replaced by е. If you would like to look words like 'тётя' (aunt) or 'её' (her) up, you should enter 'тетя' or 'ее' into Russian - English dictionary instead. On the other hand, you simply have to know that Russian word for e.g. 'yet' is not 'еще' as the English - Russian dictionary "suggests" but 'ещё'.