The FreeDict tools are used to import, export (build) and manage FreeDict dictionaries.

FreeDict databases are encoded in the TEI XML format (chapter 9), see http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/DI.html.

The conversion is based on XSL stylesheets (see directory xsl/). These can in principle transform to any format, but only the .dict format is supported at the moment.

You should have at least the following tools installed, to build the dictionaries: make, xsltproc, tar, gzip, dictzip, dictfmt

For proper use of all our tools, Perl, Espeak(-ng), Python > 3.4, Git and a XML-capable editor are required. Furthermore we require the perl packages libxml-libxml and libxml-libxslt.

If you use Debian/Ubuntu, you should install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install make unzip xsltproc libxml-libxml-perl libicu-dev libxml-libxslt-perl python3 python3-icu virtualenv python3-virtualenv espeak-ng git

On Windows, it is easiest to install Msys2 or Cygwin. Both offer an easy method to install the required tools.

You should clone this repository to a path with no spaces and add an environment variable FREEDICT_TOOLS to point to this directory.

A lot of the internal scripts need additional Python libraries. To fully make use of them, you should set up a Python virtual environment for that. To help you getting started, make mk_venv is there to guide you through the process and make mk_venv-help will explain you why and how you should use make mk_venv.

Hint: If you do not like virtual environments, you are free to set up everything by hand yourself. See the file requirements.txt for more details.

Once done, you can get help on the available actions in any directory containing a Makefile by typing make help.

Most of the documentation can be found in the FreeDict HOWTO at

https://github.com/freedict/fd-dictionaries/wiki/FreeDict-HOWTO

In general, it is a good idea to have a look at our wiki at

https://github.com/freedict/fd-dictionaries/wiki

Furthermore, the whole build system is explained in chapter 8 of the HOWTO, mentioned above.

For creating slob files, you need to install tei2slob:

virtualenv env-slob -p python3 --system-site-packages  # create self contained python env
source env-slob/bin/activate  # activate it
pip install git+https://github.com/itkach/slob.git  # install general slob tools
pip install git+https://github.com/itkach/tei2slob.git  # install tei2slob converter

Now tei2slob will be in your path. For new shells, you will have to execute source env-slob/bin/activate again, or put env-slob/bin/tei2slob into your PATH.

Sebastian Humenda, Mar 2018