koreader
FR: Prompt to search in disabled dictionaries if nothing is found
Instead of koreader looking through all of them anyway because, I assume, it makes lookups very slow, what's the point of disabling them? Sorry for mentioning an issue in a FR, I'm probably misunderstanding the usage too, enlighten me please.
Does your feature request involve difficulty completing a task? Please describe. I have 15 dictionaries installed, 4 different languages, 6 in JP, and even if I disable all of them but one, it takes age to find a definition. Actually unless I only have these 6 dicts in koreader, it will ask me what to do after doing a long-press on a word even if I have don't-ask-go-dictionary-lookup-something setting enabled.
Describe the solution you'd like Either an option to have a the said prompt from the title or making it the default behavior.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Not alternative but for now, I'll just manually move the dictionary folders somewhere else in koreader(a folder named dicts), for what I need.
Instead of koreader looking through all of them anyway because, I assume, it makes lookups very slow, what's the point of disabling them?
Exactly that. Also even in circumstances where it isn't slow it might just get in the way due to being the wrong language or a different edition of the same dictionary or something.
I would like to have a variation of this: if fuzzy search is disabled and a dictionary lookup failed, then provide a convenient button to enable fuzzy search for this specific word alone and do the dictionary lookup again.
As for searching in all dictionaries. Could this become a resource usage problem (primarily memory footprint) if the dictionaries are large and there are a lot of them? Also is it possible that the slow lookups are Japanese specific and caused by spending too much time in the Lua code of the Japanese language support plugin? Does this happen on a low spec device?
KOReader version: 2023.03 "Cherry Blossom" Device: Kindle Paperwhite 4 (5.15.1.1)
I did some testing and it does seem to be Japanese specific... On a JP epub this JP dictionary alone(the lightest(?) I could find) with all the other language dicts just disabled result in the same issue.
Also, all dicts disabled(including the JP one) but an EN one on an EN epub, I can't say for sure but it does seem to not be as instant as when there's no JP dict at all in the dict folder.
Keep in mind dictionaries have always been a bit wonky on Kindle for some reason (probably I/O related because of the fuse proxy), so a Kindle is not necessarily a good benchmark for this.
For reference, on my Kobo Aura H2O it takes about a second with 6 reasonably sized dictionaries enabled.
Not quite exactly what’s being asked here, but i believe dictionary presets solves this problem. Should it close this issue as well?
I don't know, the main concern was indeed performance and your PR solves more than half of it but this FR has a different purpose I'm not sure anymore, probably that it was annoying to have cycle through all dicts to get the relevant info, I'm not sure.
Either way it's not an issue for me anymore as I'm on an e-reader, so feel free to close it. Thank you by the way!
well the title is "Prompt to search in disabled dictionaries if nothing is found", and you will be able to do just that, albeit manually so I think s good enough to close it.
Maybe I should have titled it "Automatically search in disabled dictionaries if nothing is found in enabled dictionaries", probably worth another issue or I could make a plugin using the features of this PR, thank you.
Maybe I should have titled it "Automatically search in disabled dictionaries if nothing is found in enabled dictionaries", probably worth another issue or I could make a plugin using the features of this PR, thank you.
This has been solved as well by #14399