This document
provides some information about the plugins currently available for
and distributed with Klicklack.
There are two different types of
plugins: User interface (UI) and dictionary plugins.
As only developers will be interested in the underlying technology, it will be covered in a separate document.
All plugins can
dynamically – at runtime – be loaded, unloaded, activated
and deactivated.
To do this, open the main window (right mouse
button on icon in kicker's system area -> "Undock from
Panel")
To use a plugin, it must be loaded. If you want to use it regularly, activate it. If a dictionary plugin is loaded. But not active, it may nevertheless chosen explicitly by you for a single query (at least if you use the ksteak GUI). This, in my opinion, would be a good choice for a plugin which accesses the internet and you have a dialup connection.
As to the UI plugins, the situation is quite different. Plugins which offer a real GUI (such as ksteak) and those which only issue queries (such as OCR) must be active to be of any use.
In the future, however, there will be plugins, e.g. text-to-speech, that would speak everything sent between the plugins, thus overusing my patience. Keep them deactivated and choose explicitly from the real GUI what the plugin is supposed to speak.
As of now, ksteak is
the only real GUI, so you have to use it.
The original authors
are Michael Heidecke and Olaf Hartig. Thanks to their efforts this
great plugin exists.
There are some hidden features, and I have added some "cool" new ones.
a middle click on the tray icon enables clipboard watching
you can dock the main window to the panel. A left click on the system tray icon will make ksteak translate what is in the clipboard.
To choose a word you want to ask a specific plugin (see above), click on the cross hair icon, click on a word in the text browser, then choose your dictionary in the popup box. (This is not done via OCR, so it only works inside ksteak)
None
This plugin uses the
great free OCR implementation gocr by Jörg Schulenburg and B.B.
Gnecco.
There is also no doubt that the plugin is inspired by the
MS ® Windows ® program Babylon (tm).
The code the find
letters and the limits of a word was contributed by Jens Henrik
Goebbert.
You place the cursor
over a word anywhere on the screen and press a shortcut, per
default Ctrl+Alt+Space. I am still thinking about how to achieve the
shift+right mouse button behavior, but it doesn't seem to be
trivial.
The recognition rate is amazingly good from my point of
view if you keep in mind that all this is based on free software for
which noone was paid a single Euro. If you are of a different
opinion, hack the code and improve it.
I also like that shortcut because it pops up a text edit box if it does not find text. So for the keyboard junkies, it will be much faster to Strg+Alt+Space or whatever else than moving the mouse and clicking on ksteak's window.
gocr available from http://jOCR.sourceforge.net
or http://altmark.nat.uni-magdeburg.de/~jschulen/ocr/index.html
(you
need the application gocr installed anywhere in your path, not
the library libgocr)
The dcop plugin provides an interface to KDE's inter-process communication technology. There are six functions. All trigger a query to be issued and dispatched to all plugins active. Four of them also return a value: Either XML in the form it is used internally for results, or HTML code (without header tags). As arguments XML representing a query or a plain word can be passed.
Use kdcop to have a close look at the syntax.
KSteak provides a front end to the steak dictionary for English to German and vice versa. It is obviously also taken from KSteak by Michael Heidecke and Olaf Hartig.
the steak dictionary, available from http://www.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~razi/steak/steak.html
KQuick is the backend part of the *Quick project's application KQuick (without the Babylon (tm) part). This project has assembled a huge number of dictionaries, obviously from various sources such as ding or Freedict, brought them in a unified format and converted them to Unicode. Looking up is very fast (much faster than ksteak in my current implementation).
Some dictionaries available from http://www.futureware.at/quick.htm. Unzip and install them so that the files can be found in /usr/share/trans/plain.
I have written a small and very primitive command line tool. It is (at least for the German-speaking users consistently) named tipptapp and will only be useful for you if you develop because it outputs raw XML. If you study the code you will also see that most of the work is done by the library to which I have outsourced the dictionary stuff.